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

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#131

Post by bluedino » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:48 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…

The version I heard, the item being cooked is cut in half because the grandmother had a smaller oven, and otherwise it would not fit.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#132

Post by nugi » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:48 PM UTC

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.)

Salt is generally good for you, and enhances sweetness in baked goods. There is no good reason to omit it.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#133

Post by sizzzzlerz » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

If your mother's secret recipe calls for Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, Velveeta processed cheese, or Jello mix, here's a hint: It probabally isn't original.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#134

Post by trop » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:56 PM UTC

heleph wrote: post #50

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…

Good on your mother for persisting until she got to the bottom of the brownie mystery! It’s a bit of a pity the company tampered with such a successful recipe! My brownie recipe is from a cookbook and I tried a lot of variations on it and then had to concede that the person who wrote the recipe got it just right. I make it with high quality chocolate and butter and then am very careful not to over bake it and they tu…

> I tried a lot of variations on it and then had to concede that the person who wrote the recipe got it just right.

Part of this phenomena comes from 20th century cooking (especially for sweets): the ingredients are mass produced to high standards of consistency, and hence there may be one just right recipe (especially if you're backing in a climate controlled kitchen at sea level). Consider, instead, artisanal bread baking in 2018. Your flour comes from a food coop which used to get it stone ground by an Amish cooperative, but now switched suppliers to a local farmer -- and the recipe needs to change. Your sourdough starter turned acidic because you went away on vacation and it sat in the fridge -- change the recipe again! It's an unusually damp and chilly day, and the loaf is sitting out during its second rise -- you'll need to change the recipe!

Of course this is part of the thrill of this sort of baking -- that you have to understand the underlying processes, not just the well-made building blocks, to end up with good results. Sort of like switching from running OS X or Windows to, say, Linux from Scratch...

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#135

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 6:59 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…

Cue: the forgetting curve.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534480

(It applies not just to recent learning, but institutional and cultural memories as well.)

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#136

Post by beat » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

Pulcinella wrote: post #123

beat wrote: post #112

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)…

I’ll also add the recommendations I usually make. Anyone interested in learning to cook, Americas Test Kitchen Cooking School (And also Cooks Illustrated Cooking Science and Science of Good Cooking ) would probably be good for much of HN's audience. It is much more of a cooking "textbook" than most cookbooks. It explains what you are doing and why you do it instead of just a big list of recipes. There is also Moderni…

Certainly, The Cooking Gene is not just a straight cookbook - it's barely a cookbook at all. Instead, it's a history book more than anything, using the evolution of a cuisine to trace the cultural history of the African diaspora in America, and its broader impact on American culture. The appearance of certain foods, of ingredients and techniques, is a map of history. Fascinating stuff! (I got it on recommendation of a friend in the State Department, who called it the best book she read in 2017.)

As for learning to cook... yeah, the more I see "recipe" books completely decontextualized, the more bizarre they seem to me. Cooking is cultural, and arises from available ingredients, available tools, and known techniques. The idea that you can just make dishes completely in isolation from their cultural context is weirdly postmodernist.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#137

Post by SirZimzim » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

hycaria wrote: post #76

todd8 wrote: post #67

My wife and I have a the simplest, silly "secret" recipe. Many of her girlfriends don't work and some are really amazing cooks, but my wife who works full time doesn't feel like she has time to bake cookies or make three-bean salad or whatever. She simply knows the best places to pick those things up around town, transfers the food to plastic containers for transport, and labels it with a piece of tape that simply sa…

That sounds kinda shallow. Why bother with faking, as obviously no one cares ?

Especially chocolate chip cookies

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#138

Post by SirZimzim » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #37

draugadrotten wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different tomatoes taste quite different too. One brand which is great for pasta and pizza is Mutti. (I am unaffiliated, just a happy customer.) https://www.mutti-parma.com/us/#!/our-tomato-fields-and-your...

Pretty much every blind taste test you'll find done in America of grocery store canned tomatoes has brands grown in California vastly outperforming imports.

Blind taste test of people near California?

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#139

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

Pulcinella wrote: post #123

beat wrote: post #112

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)…

I’ll also add the recommendations I usually make. Anyone interested in learning to cook, Americas Test Kitchen Cooking School (And also Cooks Illustrated Cooking Science and Science of Good Cooking ) would probably be good for much of HN's audience. It is much more of a cooking "textbook" than most cookbooks. It explains what you are doing and why you do it instead of just a big list of recipes. There is also Moderni…

As long as we're doing recommendations :-) Before the days of Alton Brown, I lived by The Cake Bible https://www.amazon.com/Cake-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/068... I'm amazed that it still costs about the same that I paid back in 1988!

Classic Home Desserts (https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Home-Desserts-Treasury-Contem...) seems to be back in print!!! Yay!!! Not as theoretical as The Cake Bible, but it has interesting notes about the origins of various recipes. Try the Jack Daniels Raisin Roll -- one of my favorites.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#140

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 7:33 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #117

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

The smell reliant cooks I know apply it equally to baked goods. They crab at me for opening the oven to check by eye. They can smell that it isn't done yet.

This would include my mother and oldest son. I have many years more experience cooking than my son and I still help him with understanding recipes because I have a better skill base than he has. I cannot cook like him. He is a much better cook than I am.

I am happy to do vegetable prep, a thing he loathes and sucks at, and happy to play consulting chef to fill in his knowledge gaps. Meal quality went up when he took over the cooking and he enjoys it a lot more than I do. I think I don't enjoy it in part because I'm not really that good at it. He only had to run me out of the kitchen a couple of times and then I was very happily all "Fine. Be that way. I will stay out of your kitchen." (said with a winky, basically)