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The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

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Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#91

Post by madcaptenor »

goodcanadian wrote: post #6
zerocrates wrote: post #2

On the "fudge guy" who was using the recipe from the marshmallow container, or the Toll House cookies winning 2 of the top spots: there's a lot more to good results than just the recipe. Equipment, skill, the idiosyncratic ways you don't follow the recipe or fill in where it's underspecified... Don't necessarily give in to the temptation to ascribe the phenomenon merely to irrationality or sentiment. Plus, it must be…

Indeed, my mother (unsurprisingly) uses exactly the same recipe as my grandmother did for chocolate chip cookies (I suspect it also came from the side of a chocolate chip bag). The cookies turned out very differently, however, depending on who made them.

My mom has a box of cards with recipes on them. These are preprinted cards to handwrite on, but they have blanks for the name of the recipe, who you got it from, and how many it serves. One of them is the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it says it's from my aunt.

(My aunt is not known for her cooking.)

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#92

Post by floren »

For me, the most important part of the "secret family recipe" is the element of curation. There's surely hundreds of recipes for almond kringler out there, but I know that the one my mom uses at Christmas is extremely delicious. If your family has decided they really like the sugar cookie recipe in the 1985 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, perfect! The "family" part of "secret family recipe" means that it's the recipe your family likes best, and the fact it came from such-and-such a cookbook can be the secret.

When I go online and search for a recipe, I'm taking a chance that it may be awful. That's why when I find an online recipe I enjoy, I write it down in a special notebook. This also has the advantage of letting me cut out all the prefacing garbage ("my husband and my 3 beautiful children LOVE coming home on a crisp winter afternoon to a delicious bowl of this yummy soup blah blah blah") and trim down the directions to the sort of terse and informative stuff you'd find in a real cookbook. Then if I ever want to make it again, I don't have to deal with the absolute garbage of modern recipe sites popping up notifications about how butter is on sale 2 miles away, and how I can sign up for the email newsletter, etc.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#93

Post by BlackLotus89 »

caf wrote: post #44
bsder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than that. I have an amazing chocolate cake recipe--I'm SURE it's cribbed from some magazine, chocolate container, or something. I have stopped giving it out as people simply can't get it right. There are three classes of failure: The first class of failure is in not following directions. When it says "1/2 teaspoon", they mean it. Baking is like lab--small things often make big differences. "Helping" one of…

Yes, in cooking you can fairly freely adjust ingredients and quantities to taste, but baking is science for hungry people.

From when qc was still readable http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1679

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#94

Post by isk517 »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #59
blahedo wrote: post #17

I can do them one better: my family has a meta -secret recipe. It didn't used to be secret, but it became secret through no effort or intent of our own. For a long time, decades at this point, my mom has been known for the brownies she brings to events (and, by extension, that my sister and I bring to events). People would rave about them and demand the secret, which my mom, my sister, and I would all freely give out…

So, mind sharing a formula for getting it right, irrespective of which version of the box one has? E.g., what the ideal quantity of mix is?

I'm seconding this. Use to love the boxed Betty Crocker brownies but have noticed in the last few years that they do not come out correctly anymore.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#95

Post by haikuginger »

neogodless wrote: post #63
goodcanadian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, my mother (unsurprisingly) uses exactly the same recipe as my grandmother did for chocolate chip cookies (I suspect it also came from the side of a chocolate chip bag). The cookies turned out very differently, however, depending on who made them.

Oooh - we have this. Where some of my family members refuse to include the salt, or prefer butter that melts like crazy, and they get harder, flatter versions of the cookies. My aunt (who married a chemist) pointed out how the salt actually means something, and I started including it again, and the cookies got so much better (in my opinion.)

Butter handling is key in my own chocolate chip cookies, I've found. Let it soften too much, or overbeat the batter, and you'll end up with Frisbees. Ideally you want to cream the butter and sugars until just combined; they'll get more thoroughly mixed as you add flour and other ingredients.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#96

Post by majos »

My grandmother found some old family recipes from pre-independence India. I've never made any of them because they're sometimes denominated in units that no longer exist (a "viss" for example), and some of them are even measured in currency ("buy 10 rupees of x"). Maybe I could try and account for inflation and local prices 100? years ago but...I'm not optimistic.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#97

Post by robotsonic »

bsder wrote: post #14
white-flame wrote: post #3

My mom made the best pie crust anybody who ate it ever tasted. Her recipe came from a Crisco label. One of the steps specifically said to slowly stir a liquid into the mix with a fork. Everybody else who attempted the recipe used a spoon and didn't get anywhere near the proper texture. So her difference was simply that others wouldn't follow the directions exactly.

It's more than that. I have an amazing chocolate cake recipe--I'm SURE it's cribbed from some magazine, chocolate container, or something. I have stopped giving it out as people simply can't get it right. There are three classes of failure: The first class of failure is in not following directions. When it says "1/2 teaspoon", they mean it. Baking is like lab--small things often make big differences. "Helping" one of…

On the first class of failure, sometimes people take it a bit too far. I've watched people stress about how they level off their 1/4 tsp because if it's too heaped, it will be too much, or if there is a divot, it will be too little. As a percent error, there really isn't a real difference. Just the differences in brands and batches of ingredients will cause more error in your recipes than a slight miss-measure.

There's definitely a need to measure well, but that third class of failure you mentioned is probably better to pay attention to. If you know your ingredients and operating conditions, you'll definitely fair better.

On the topic of measuring, I do wish more new recipe books went back to using weights. Baking with a scale is so much easier/faster/less clean up. It surprises me how many people I know who think it is too much work to use a scale until they see me do it and how little effort it really is.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#98

Post by haikuginger »

macNchz wrote: post #74
DamnYuppie wrote: post #8

This brings back some great memories. My mom made fantastic home made jams. All through my childhood family members and friends would clamor for her jams she made at Christmas. This year I finally got her to give me her recipe....it was basically the recipe on the packet of Sure Jell :-/ She did note that the important part was to by fresh fruits for the jam and not frozen so I guess there was that. Regardless it was…

To be fair, if the jams are canned it’s important to make sure you have the right amount of sugar and acid to make it safely shelf stable. I make jams every summer to give to family and friends and I still follow the recipes in the box of Pomona’s pectin. The thing I’ve been perfecting over the years is finding the best fruit at the farmer’s market and then processing it (peeling/blending/cooking) it in a way that yi…

The processing is key; the prime example for me is peach jam, where if you just chop the fruit up, you end up with peach suspended in mostly-clear gel. If, on the other hand, you blend the peach mixture, you end up with a delicious consistency that's flavorful all the way through and easy to spread.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#99

Post by madenine »

I find that most of our family 'secret' recipes are the result of trying several recipes for a given dish, picking the best one but incorporating lessons learned from the others. Its not uncommon for a page in our family book to consists of a photocopied page from a published cookbook + notes like "fully mix in the spices 1 at a time in this order:" where the recipe just says "mix in the spices".

Additional notes like "[cousin] likes this with more cinnamon, but [uncle] will always try to add more sugar" are helpful for holidays.

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