Recipe is one thing. The quality of the ingredients can make a difference.
Did Grammy use the Tasty Pastry flour, or Brand B?
And how do you know Grammy wasn’t Grandpa?
Posted on 10/30/2023 6:05:28 AM PDT by texas booster
When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on the menu: his grandmother’s secret potato salad recipe.
“I told the chef, ‘My very favorite potato salad in the world was the one my grandmother made,’” Meyer recalls.
That’s a big statement coming from Meyer, a successful restaurateur who has earned Michelin Stars and founded the fast-casual chain Shake Shack. At the time, his grandmother had already passed away, but Meyer remembered that she kept recipes on three by five index cards. After a search, he found the right card and handed it to the restaurant’s chef, who invited Meyer to try it in the Blue Smoke kitchen.
When Meyer arrived, the sous chefs had a big bowl of potato salad that brought back memories of his grandmother. He tried it, smiled, and told the chefs, “That’s exactly right.” They grinned back at him mischievously. Eventually, Meyer broke and asked, “What’s so funny?” A chef pulled out a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise and placed it on the table. Meyer looked at it, then realized that the secret recipe his grandmother had hoarded for years was on the jar. It was the official Hellman’s recipe for potato salad.
This actually seems to be a common phenomenon. The television show Friends even features a similar discovery, when one character, Phoebe, realizes that her grandmother’s “famous” chocolate chip cookie recipe came from a bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips.
Two months ago, we asked Gastro Obscura readers to send in accounts of their own discoveries. We promised a (loving) investigation of grandparents lying about family recipes.
(Excerpt) Read more at atlasobscura.com ...
I got this great secret recipe for stovetop rice pudding from an old restaurant chef - I wouldn’t be at all surprised if turns out it’s from a package of rice.
1 lb rice
1 lb sugar
1 gallon whole milk
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 teaspoon salt
Fresh nutmeg
Mix everything but nutmeg into large pot.
Boil until the wooden spoon stands up.
(You have to watch it like a hawk and adjust the flame so it doesn’t boil over)
Pour into 9x13 baking dish and chill - sprinkle with fresh ground nutmeg.
Serve with whipped cream (optional).
(It’s also good warm if you can’t wait)
My kids always beg me to make it on holidays.
The perfectly chocolate cake on the Hershey’s cocoa container never disappoints. You can even doctor it up with other flavors or add a creme cheese filling.
It’s my go to chocolate cake.
I really do have a secret ingredient to my apple pies. Ever so subtle but so delicious. I get asked every holiday to make pies for friends and family. I’ve been told to sell my pies but mass production would spoil the recipe.
My great-great-grandmother was apparently quite the cook, and even used a secret ingredient in almost all of her cooking. Turns out it was hate. Usually it’s love, but she had issues...
Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker got their recipes from housewives and local independent cooks. They gradually made them cheaper to make or they substituted their own products like Ketchup for tomato sauce or Bisquick for eggs and flour. But they did start out as recipes people loved, turned into commercialized versions and back into loved recipes.
I always use and consult two recipe books. One is the book from the 1960s which always uses things that are in the average housewife’s kitchen from the 1960s it often uses corn flakes instead of starting with flour. (either Joy of Cooking or Betty Crocker are fine)
I then use a recipe book that researched the original versions of recipes from the 1800s before most of these products were invented. You start with tomatoes to make tomato sauce, not a can of tomato sauce. I look at both recipes and decide what short cuts I am going to take and where I want to go with the original. Original recipes often use lard or butter, never corn oil.
Oh, c’mon people. Laws have been relaxed.
It was weed. Home grown for decades. Granny knew all about it. Take a look at all of the old piccies of grey haired grannies onna porch smoking a corn cob pipe. You really think that was tobacco? :)
My mother always used some cardamom in her apple pies. Sugar, cinnamon and cardamom.
I think they called it rabbit tobaccie.
I went TDY to Paris France with a Bird Colonel. All the way over, he talked about how much he looked forward to authentic French Onion Soup.
Every night, at dinner he would ask for French Onion Soup only to be told that they only had it a few times each week and tonight wasn’t one.
Finally, the last night, he asked for French Onion Soup and the waiter told him, Of Course we have French Onion Soup. Well, it was the best french onion soup he’d ever tasted. He ask the waiter: “could he have the recipe?”. He stated he would understand if the chef wanted to keep such a great recipe secret.
The waiter returned in a few minutes and told the Colonel that: “You can fix this recipe at home.” and sat a can of Cambells French Onion Soup on the table.
Lahmajoon (”Armenian pizza”)
dough
1/3 stick of butter
2.5 cups of flour
salt
enough water to form a dough
I use a bread machine to make the dough
Mix the topping ingredients in a bowl while letting the dough rise:
a pound of meat (10% fat minimum so it will not dry out excessively when cooked)(my mom always used ground round hamburger but the standard meat is lamb)
6 ounces of tomato paste
28 ounce can worth of tomatoes, drained
minced garlic
about half a bunch of chopped fresh parsley (I grow my own, the store parsley often tastes like hay)
some paprika for color (I don’t normally use this nowadays)
some salt
I roll the dough out to cover two cookie pans like my mom did, but the standard way is to make rounds 10 to 12 inches in diameter. The dough should be rolled out to be about 1/8th of an inch thick.
If using cookie pans, the dough should extend up the sides of the pans.
If making traditional rounds, increase the dough recipe amounts by about half.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Place the topping on the cookie pan dough while oven is preheating.
Bake about 28-34 minutes if using cookie pans. The dough should brown some and the topping should not dry out. Check about every couple minutes starting about 25 minutes in.
The topping on traditional rounds would not be as thick, so don’t bake them as long.
The cookie pan lahmajoon on the top oven rack will cook before the one on the lower oven rack.
Genuine butter, truly fresh parsley and good garlic are essential for proper flavor.
I add some dark unsweetened cocoa powered to my turkey chili along with other secret ingredients. :)
I am trying this rice pudding recipe.
I started on an old cookbook quest when the White House Cookbook was reprinted in the late 60's. I made a hot chocolate recipe exactly as listed - only to discover that the ingredients had become more concentrated over time. It was still an excellent, if thick hot chocolate drink.
There are a few YT channels that look at recipes and how they have changed over time, especially as artificial leavening was created and started being used.
I have this amazing recipe, a very unusual and original one, and a friend’s mother’s neighbor asked for it, which I obliged very kindly. I happened to come across a cookbook at a thrift store which was from a local church. I bought it and when going through it, I found my recipe which my friend’s neighbor had submitted - with her name as the creator of the recipe.
my dad made a dish that we all loved, which he named after our family name on the spur of the moment when we asked him what it was called ...
let’s say “Smith” is our last name, so he claimed the dish was called “Smith Special” ... no doubt he had no idea what the name really was, but didn’t want to admit that he made a dish that he didn’t know the name of ... us, being little kids at the time, thought that was a perfectly good name, and went away completely satisfied that we knew what we were eating, namely “Smith Special” ... thereafter, we often asked him to make “Smith Special” ...
“Smith Special” was made from elbow macaroni, canned crushed tomatoes, chopped green bell peppers, ground beef and salt and pepper ...
i was telling my wife about this, and she said her family had the same dish but called it “Chinese Goulash” ... since her family is from New Jersey and mine is from North Carolina we figured the ACTUAL recipe came from some magazine like Family Circle or Good Housekeeping, because women’s homemaker magazines were pervasive in those pre-Internet days ...
Betty Crack-er?
Recipe is one thing. The quality of the ingredients can make a difference.
Did Grammy use the Tasty Pastry flour, or Brand B?
And how do you know Grammy wasn’t Grandpa?
Friends Season 7 Phoebe's Grandmother's Secret Chocolate Cookie recipe
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Lisa Kudrow....like Mrs. Pete Blonde and Left handed . (At the time we met, her hair was longer than Lisa Kudrow! On a windy day she walked around in a golden cloud! )
Cooking is chemistry. How you handle ingredients can change the outcome, especially in Baking. But even dead simple commercial stuff is subject to this. This is why two different people making a boxed Mac n Cheese side can have markedly different results.
My mother’s delicious brownies were from the recipe on the Bakers chocolate squares box. I still use it, still delicious.
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