The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’ • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#111

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

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…

That is an awesome story. Although I am a bit leery of the 'Nutrition value' argument. It sounds like the manufacturer wanted to do what everyone else seems to do which is reduce the quantity of product in the same size box rather than raise the price, and when they did that the 'old' recipe would not work correctly. Which they "fixed".

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#112

Post by beat » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

Book recommendation, if you're into this stuff... The Cooking Gene - A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, by Michael W Twitty. I'm currently halfway through, and it's fascinating. It delves deep into the roots of pre-20th century recipes and food traditions, and how African, European, and Native American cooking techniques and ingredients (along with the social structures of slavery) joined to create what became Southern cooking.

Take that Thanksgiving standby, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. That dish can be traced directly to slavery in the Caribbean! Yams were a big part of the diet (a food from Africa), and on sugar plantations, they would take cooked yams to the boiling vats and ladle boiling sugar juice directly onto the yams. This came to America via the slave trade (many American slaves came from the Caribbean rather than directly from Africa), and evolved into new dishes that preserved the flavor without easy access to giant vats of boiling sugar.

The tracing of family recipes back to their origins is amazing.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#113

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

Kluny wrote: post #107

What I want to know is where does the recipe on the side of the box come from? The robots who came up with that are the true heroes, imho.

My mom always would use recipes from the sides of containers. She said "they're going to try 100s of recipes to find one that will make their product look good, so no need for me to try a dozen recipes that they have probably already tried"

Often the recipes were customer submitted (though I believe the Toll House cookie recipe came from a restaurant chef), and companies would test and/or tweak recipes before putting them on the side of the box.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#114

Post by dmckeon » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #102

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…

> The new recipe had different amounts of every ingredient and it just did not come out right. So what are the right amounts if you please? PS. I've heard of people adding an egg to a box of cake mix when it isn't required.

There is a marketing story of a company that created a cake mix with everything in the box: "just add water and bake".

Sales were poor, and market research and perhaps focus groups determined that people felt slightly guilty that they weren't doing enough work in creating a cake - so the company went back, removed the egg components from the mix, changed the instructions, and sales rebounded.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#115

Post by IgorPartola » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #101

IgorPartola wrote: post #68

I remember reading an old parable about a woman who always cut off the ends of her meatloaf before serving it. At one point someone asked her why she did that, and she said that her mother had always done it that way. So she went to ask her mother, and got the same answer. The two of them went to the woman’s grandmother who said that the serving plate she cooked the meatloaf was too small, so she cut off the ends to…

Primo Levi told a similar story about tracking down the source of a lacquer recipe when he was working at a paint factory. There was a point in the recipe where the instructions called for adding half an onion into the vat of lacquer. As a chemist, he was fascinated by this because he could not think of any way the chemicals in the onion, in that quantity, could affect the end product. He eventually found a retired e…

That's very clever. Reminds me of doing plumbing with copper piping and using bread to stuff the pipes before soldering them in order to not have the leftover water flowing to where you are soldering, making it impossible.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#116

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

My grandmother's pīrāgi were made with Poppin "Fresh" dough.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#117

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #32

The best cooks I know all have an excellent sense of smell and rely heavily upon it to get the timing right. Try putting that in your official recipe.

this is why most of the recipes were desserts (which are typically baked goods). Baking is much more about getting the proportions right, and often uses refined ingredients and you usually don't make changes after it starts cooking.

When you cook something in a pan and are using fresh ingredients that don't come in standard sizes and strengths then a feedback loop becomes much more important

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#118

Post by zupzupper » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #68

I remember reading an old parable about a woman who always cut off the ends of her meatloaf before serving it. At one point someone asked her why she did that, and she said that her mother had always done it that way. So she went to ask her mother, and got the same answer. The two of them went to the woman’s grandmother who said that the serving plate she cooked the meatloaf was too small, so she cut off the ends to…

> I actually wonder how many of the Blue Apron/HelloFresh recipes will wind up being “secret family recipes” in a few years.

We have already incorporated a few we liked into a recipe box with hand written cards....

Also our oatmeal cookie recipe comes from the back of the McCann's quick oatmeal box....don't care...it's delicious.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#119

Post by graphitezepp » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

robotsonic wrote: post #97

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…

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…

I find it amusing you downplay the importance (not that I disagree) of precision, and than advocate for measuring by weight for entirely different reasons. Precision is the typical argument people make for scales.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#120

Post by conductr » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

Both my wife and my family have these instances regarding Betty Crocker recipes / Southern Living cookbook recipes. Although, I will say, our attempts at following the recipes are still not the same as our grandmother's. What I've noticed is our grandmothers are just better cooks; allowing them to eyeball measure, adjust temps to conditions, time things out better, and generally solve problems as they arise.

In a sense the recipe is just an idea, the cook still needs good execution.