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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

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Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#491

Post by wink »

beloch wrote: post #20
neilv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that... From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different. My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, famil…

Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.

Getting a new oven has invalidated every single time written down in a recipe here. (usually not too hard to adjust, but still)

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#492

Post by mathgeek »

airstrike wrote: post #113
nanolith wrote: post #45

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…

Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#493

Post by kruador »

teddyh wrote: post #333
nvader wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst... This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.

The third footnote in that article, in its entirety: > Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%. Is this what passes for a reference now?

The text that the footnote is attached to is:

"Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF." I infer 'IMPish' as meaning 'like Instant Mashed Potato'.

I read that footnote as a somewhat oblique criticism of two LLMs, rather than on the statistic itself - which may indeed have just been fabricated by the LLM as opposed to an actual statistic somehow dredged from its training data, or pulled from a web search.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#494

Post by mschuster91 »

bluGill wrote: post #477
mschuster91 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. A burger at McKing takes what, a minute to order, a minute to eat, and a minute to dispose of the wrapper paper. Making a burger on your own? At least an hour worth of time just to buy the ingredients, drive home and store them appropriately so they don't go bad (which assumes…

I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal. I spend an hour a day cooking, which does add up though-

> I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal.

... if you have a car that's roadworthy enough, time for the drive, money for the fuel, and even then, access to fresh groceries is not a given in the first place because there's no place selling them. 39 million Americans live in food deserts [1], and in places that are not food deserts, actual groceries can simply be unaffordable.

And then, once you have the ingredients, you need to store them. A bunch of stuff will only keep fresh if you have a working refrigerator, in some cases a working freezer... both are far from given. In really small apartments, you might not even have the space for even a small fridge, or you might be so poor your electricity is cut off. Or the apartment is too infested with rats and cockroaches to keep any kind of food that doesn't need (or goes bad in) a fridge and is not canned, which seriously limits the food you can prepare for yourself.

Oh and theoretically Costco or whatever large scale loads of food might be cheaper as well, but again, you need space to meal-prep and even more space in fridges and freezers to keep the food edible for a few days.

Poverty is fucking expensive in the long run because the lack of upfront money for stuff like a car, fridge and a residence with enough clean space forces people to use expensive options such as ready-to-eat meals or fast food - or to go and fill their caloric demand with ultra cheap soda that's in the end just sugar syrup.

Oh and the homeless, they got it even worse, they don't have any other option than that because they don't even have a safe roof over their head. And yet, people look at them eating burgers or soda and saying paternalistic condescending bullshit like "if they just saved on the burgers and soda they could afford an apartment", yeah no that's not how things work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_deserts_in_the_United_Sta...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#495

Post by Fluorescence »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #461
Fluorescence wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill". Old family recipes would just say things like "add flour" and that amount was taught face-to-face and hands-on where you added enough till it looked "right" because onions and eggs etc. were not a uniform size.

No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill". Counterpoint: https://oldbritishrecipes.com/collection-of-old-biscuit-reci... And yeah, depending on how far back you're going or what sources you're using, there will be a lot of vaguely defined quantities. Glen of Glen and Friends on Youtube regularly cooks vintage recipes and gets into how things evolved over t…

I'm sure there will be examples and my childhood memories won't be great but that link isn't a good example of British recipes.

Most of the instances of "cups" come from the "Edwardian recipes" which is a collection of international recipes including American. It includes in the preface a Table of Measures which is what you do for Brits who see "cup" and ask "what the fuck is that?"!

4 cups flour = 1 quart or 1 lb.

2 cups of butter (solid) = 1 lb.

2¹⁄₂ cups powdered sugar = 1 lb.

1 cup = ¹⁄₂ pint

1 glass = ¹⁄₂ pint

1 pint milk or water = 1 lb.

9 large eggs = 1 lb.

1 table-spoon butter = 1 oz.

1 heaping table-spoon butter = 2 ozs.

Butter the size of an egg = 2 ozs.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68137/68137-h/68137-h.htm#Li...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#496

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #461
Fluorescence wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill". Old family recipes would just say things like "add flour" and that amount was taught face-to-face and hands-on where you added enough till it looked "right" because onions and eggs etc. were not a uniform size.

No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill". Counterpoint: https://oldbritishrecipes.com/collection-of-old-biscuit-reci... And yeah, depending on how far back you're going or what sources you're using, there will be a lot of vaguely defined quantities. Glen of Glen and Friends on Youtube regularly cooks vintage recipes and gets into how things evolved over t…

It's notable with that link that old recipes mostly used weights for the ingredients and only a minority used cups

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#497

Post by wink »

Everyone talks about the cake mix and its quality, but I'm much more amazed that for all the "for Americans 500 years is a lot" jokes I find myself much more anecdotal things that seem to be more easily preserved on a time span of 50 to 200 years, for example being able to even buy the same cake mix as just 50 years ago.

Maybe it's all going back to World War II and stuff here in Germany changing too much, but from all the stories from my parents and their childhood after the war, I don't see a lot of this. (Not saying it's good or bad, I have some recipes but they're all in the "100g of flour" style). Or Genealogy. I didn't put in a huge amount of effort but my experience is that tracking your ancestors for more than a couple generations is not as popular in my working class circles.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#498

Post by mathgeek »

desi_ninja wrote: post #276
nanolith wrote: post #45

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…

Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.

Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro...

If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#499

Post by MisterSandman »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #371
jaggederest wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix. It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated fl…

Ive made great cookies from 100 year old recipes. Why do would i want a carbon copy of a store cookie. Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.

Can we stop calling things you find weird “American?” Like Jesus Christ, Europe isn’t some special land where everyone makes food from scratch and capitalism doesn’t exist.

I’m not even American, but are we seriously judging people for baking cakes using cake mixes? It’s been around for almost a century. I highly doubt that cake mixes aren’t just as common in Europe than they are in the US within a margin of error.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#500

Post by MisterSandman »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #454
cowsandmilk wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe accounts for 31% of baking mix sales while North America accounts for 24.5%. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/bakery-p...

That's despite Europe having 2x the population of North America.

Europe is also somewhat poorer than North America, to be fair.
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