I’m finding this discussion soooo satisfying on so many levels 
(I’ve been thinking for a while now that the bbs really needs a new long-term/ongoing food-and-cooking thread…)
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I felt kind of sad originally reading this, because it struck me how food traditions really aren’t retained. All the “old country” recipes that were just standard American versions. Diversity and heritage get lost. But ultimately that comes down to the fact that most people just didn’t care enough to maintain them - they weren’t important to them.
The thing here is that “traditional family” recipes turn out to be straight off the box, unmodified, from a recent decade. These aren’t things that were particular to that family, they were literally the exact same thing everyone else who used that ingredient were making.
And that’s the irony - the recipe that was consciously modified to be made one’s own doesn’t get seen as a family recipe, but the one straight off the package, where no one talked about where it came from, does.
Yeah, that’s the thing - companies crowdsourced to find the “best,” most reliable, consistent, easiest-to-cook versions of recipes that people came up with, based on popular food traditions. There’s a reason why they became “family” recipes.
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Good point. I’ve been trying to teach my SO about cooking; one of the core things her engineer mindset wouldn’t have guessed is that you can’t just follow the recipe, you have to understand:
- The role each ingredient plays
- Which ingredients are important to be precise with (and which ones you can just eyeball)
- How the flavors interact
- The fact that ingredients themselves are variable, and won’t be the same from time to time, and so you have to taste it as you’re cooking and adjust accordingly.
Once you kinda understand all that, you can look at a recipe and start making improvisations based on your whim or what you have available.
Some of my best dishes started out with a recipe that I tweaked a little bit, or an amalgamation of 2-3 different recipes.
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This is great on many things:
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It is! I’m trying to restrain myself from making all of my food taste like an everything bagel right now. Great on eggs, on salads, avocado toast, and used as a crust on baked chicken.
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When I used to do tech support for IT folks and developers, I returned a call from a guy at the Goya office in Mexico.
Their hold music is entirely these peppy 10 second long songs about how awesome Goya is. Varying latin music styles as well.
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@nungesser @Akimbo_NOT @jerwin
KFC’s “Eleven Secret Herbs and Spices”
the [35 PM] link is a screenshot of the source marerial
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You aren’t wrong and you aren’t quite correct either. Cooking is equal parts art and science. The quality of the ingredients, the ratio of the ingredients, and the cooking technique all add-up to create good food.
It makes sense to me that most family recipes are just iterative versions of published known recipes. When it comes down to it, what makes a recipe good to an individual or a family is when the ingredients or technique are tweaked to match preferences. ie…Grandma’s pasta sauce is the best because she adds sugar to compensate for the bitter tomatoes and since we like spicy food, she lets it simmer with a healthy dose of spicy sausage. The basic sauce recipe itself could be from the side of the pasta box!
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heh
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You may well think that is bad, but check this out:
- from now on I’ll claim anything I make is “from bobtato’s secret recipe”, even though I have never (knowingly?) met you in person, or exchanged a single recipe.
…hey anyone want bobtato’s biscotti recipe? I(*) just invented it last night!
(*) By “I” I actually mean “my wife”…
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https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.
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It’s not that the recipe itself is secret, it’s the origin that’s a secret. If everyone knew I downloaded my “secret family recipe” for cannoli filling from a cooking website fifteen years ago, then I wouldn’t be such a fantastic baker, now would I?
Sometimes the story matters far more than the truth.
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Ah, family recipes. My great Aunt had a butter cookie recipe that was my dad’s favorite, no idea where it came from originally. She shared it with anyone who asked, but no one else got them quite right, even my grandma who was an excellent baker. We assumed she had an extra secret she took to the grave. Then my cousin, who never bakes, made a perfect batch on the first try.
Turns out 1) my grandma wasn’t following the recipe, on the grounds that a butter cookie shouldn’t contain any margarine, and 2) it’s hard to interpret instructions like “2 glasses of flour” unless you have access to the relevant jelly jar glass at least long enough to see how big it is.
It’s hard to get good cooks to follow even good recipes. It’s even harder to get non-cooks to realize that they are in charge of what they cook, though. Family recipes are familiar starting points, no matter where they came from.
Oh and if anyone knows an actually good m&m cookie recipe I’d love to see it. Most are too dry, or too sugar cookie-ish, or too crunchy, and i don’t understand cookies enough to tweak them myself.
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When someone passes on a recipe, it isn’t about passing on the ingredients and methods. It’s a way of passing on the enjoyment of the dish. This wasn’t always obvious to me, but one spring I had a driver take me to the airport. En route, we passed some blooming dogwood. I remarked on it. He said that he got his love of dogwood from his mother. We discussed other flowers. It was a grandfather who passed on a love of magnolia blossoms, and so on.
When someone gives you a recipe, it’s about trying to share something they think is good and that you might like. This even applies when the giver is a corporate PR hack with the most cynical motives. (Chocolate covered cotton balls, anyone?) We have all sorts of old recipes, including a collection torn out of magazines or saved from food packaging. Why not? They were loved once.
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Oddly I have what would probably be considered a family recipe that members of my family believed to be from a cookbook. It was one of those times the grocery store was out of some of the pivotal ingredients and I just went with a bunch of other stuff. I really must try to find the cookbook again. I never did end up making it as intended - I have been making it as unintended for about 25 years.
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Just look at those! American cheese, ham and bananas? Blecch!
You can pry my secret family recipe for this dish from my cold dead hands…
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This. IP is dangerous because very little arises in isolation singularly once, and even if it does even less is a dead end that nothing else is built upon. you can’t own ideas or stuff them back into the bottle, but ip pretends you can. intellectual colonialism and “landgrabing” leads to lots of flag planting at the expense of the greater good and turns out is shit poor incentive and blocks more creation then it helps.
i prefer the opposite approach, the one that has lead to every golden age. golden age mentality where the free exchange of ideas and thoughts leads to cultural prosperity, and is much better for the greater good.
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The texture and crumble issues you’re describing sound like a matter of needing to refrigerate the dough (rolled into a log, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap or waxed paper) at least overnight, ideally two overnights, before forming cookie lumps on the baking sheet and baking. If your fat to flour ratio is right, letting the two mingle long enough can be the difference between an average cookie and a great cookie.
If you haven’t yet tried that, I’d recommend doing so. If you have already tried it without success, then you might need a little extra fat in the dough. Try increasing the quantity of butter by 10-15% and see if that changes anything. On the other hand, if you’re wanting more of a cake-y cookie, leave the butter alone and add an extra egg. It will be very different, but that might just be what you’re after.
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