I feel like a giant buying groceries anymore. Oh great 10 ounce box of cereal; that will be 2 bowls if I am lucky. So dumb, just show the real price and keep the portion the same.
Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.
Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.
(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. > a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie…
The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.
(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)
Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as…
Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?! Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as…
Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. > a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie…
Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to meas…
There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.
Assuming that the boxes are 13.25oz/18.25oz, looks like an updated recipe could be: - 2 boxes cake mix - 3 eggs (rounding up from ~2.9 eggs) - 1/2 cup neutral oil (rounding up from ~0.48c) YMMV
I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.
> “It’s just so upsetting,” says Judith, whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother. These “perfect little cookies” once made the rounds at bake sales, Christmas cookie exchanges, and birthdays. > a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and 1/3 cup neutral oil I realize it's not the point of the story, but this is like that Friends episode[0] where Phoebe finds out her grandmother's secret cookie…
The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs. (Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.) Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.
Eggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.