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The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

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Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#81

Post by pfooti »

neogodless wrote: post #62
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…

Not a direct reply to you, but on the topic of the Toll House recipe, and on experimentation - I am lactose intolerant. I rely heavily on Smart Balance as one of few margarine products that doesn't contain dairy and actually behaves and tastes like butter. With the Toll House recipe (that I once believed was my mom's secret family recipe), I'm able to do a perfect 1-1 swap of butter/Smart Balance, and replace milk ch…

Not to be that guy, but if you have that much if a reaction to butter, you are probably allergic to milk proteins rather than lactose intolerant. Butter (and most cheese) is very low in lactose. Of course, everyone is different (I'm lactose intolerant myself, so I avoid milk and cottage / ricotta cheese, but can eat butter and curd cheeses)

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#82

Post by jerf »

There's another interesting angle in this, which is a demonstration of how important memory and emotion is in food. The restaurateur who had created Michelin Star-winning restaurants thought the standard Hellman's potato salad recipe was very good. Now, I'm not that much of a chef, and I'm not going to say it's a bad recipe, but a chef of that caliber ought to taste even a very-well prepared instance of that recipe and immediately come up with half-a-dozen ways to improve it. I could do that in my kitchen, which is really not that well stocked with that sort of thing. There's classes of improvements; use a more interesting vinegar, use a more interesting oil, use more interesting herbs, make your own mayonnaise, use different potatos, each of those representing half-a-dozen options on their own, to say nothing of the work you can do with combinations.

If you served the Hellman's recipe to a Michelin reviewer, you're not getting a star. And I'm sure that Danny Meyer would know that instantly, were he not influenced by his memories and emotions.

Also, to be clear, I am by no means being critical of him for bringing his emotion into the dish. If it's anything, it's a positive thing, in my opinion. I'm just showing this as a very clear example of how complicated reactions to food can be.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#83

Post by justherefortart »

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.

My wife found this amazing cookie recipe online.

My mom gave her some of her 1950s cookbooks. That exact same recipe was in this cookbook. We just laughed.

At least my family is lazy, when they use a recipe from a box, jar, or whatever, they just peal/cut it off and stick it to a 3x5 card or put it in a recipe book on a blank page. So you know where that "family secret" actually came from.

The only unique sauce I've ever tried was my grandfather's BBQ sauce. It's just a bunch of other sauces mixed together, but it's pretty different. He was always changing it up but most everyone in my family has a bottle of grandpa's "condiment concoction" as my evil-ex called it.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#84

Post by wcunning »

My mother, and actually her mother before that, made modifications to the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe. Specifically, replacing butter with shortening and using just a bit of extra flour, while whipping the eggs a bit more in mixing. I watched an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats where he made that exact set of modifications to get puffy/cakey chocolate chip cookies, some 20 years after Grandma started baking them that way. It's always amusing to see your old school process be supported by proper food science.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#85

Post by kevin_b_er »

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…

They can't return to the old recipe because marketing demands the box say certain things about fat, sugar, etc. This marketing demand is usually greater than product quality.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#86

Post by sdiupIGPWEfh »

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…

A couple secret-recipe idiosyncrasies are legend among those handed down in my family. For example, wherever grandma's recipes say "a spoon of sugar", she was actually using a ladle.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#88

Post by madcaptenor »

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…

"Hmmm, that cake recipe doesn't seem to like humid days. "

I wouldn't even know to pay attention to this, as someone who cooks but doesn't bake (at least not anything more complicated than a batch of cookies). Ironically, now that I think about it, my mom has a thing she bakes that she won't make on humid days...

I also majored in chemistry and stopped doing it because everything I did in actual labs (as opposed to lab classes where the details were a little more worked out ahead of time by people in charge of the class) failed. Sometimes because water got into the reaction vessel that wasn't supposed to.

There's probably a connection here.

Re: The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

#89

Post by madcaptenor »

sdiupIGPWEfh wrote: post #86
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…

A couple secret-recipe idiosyncrasies are legend among those handed down in my family. For example, wherever grandma's recipes say "a spoon of sugar", she was actually using a ladle .

There's a recipe my mom got from a friend of my grandmother - that friend had to actually make the cookies to figure out the recipe, because the whole thing was phrased in terms of a green bowl full of flour and a blue bowl full of sugar and of course my mom didn't have the same bowls my grandmother's friend did.
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