Which are your family's recipes are the most secret/heavily guarded?
I'm curious: What are the family recipes that you (or your family members) are still protecting? Does only one person know them or is it okay to share them within the family? Are they so good that they're worth protecting?
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The only exception to that was my Yia Yia (Greek Grandmother). She refused to give out recipes, but that was only because she never measured a thing. She made her own Phyllo dough and never even measured for that. After I moved away to college, I called her to get her taco and meat sauce recipes. Yes, my Yia Yia made the best tacos and spaghetti on the planet. Her answer to me was "Honeymoo, come home and cook with me".
One of my mom's best friends was very secretive about her recipes. She'd shoo everyone out of the kitchen while she cooked. She was an amazing cook. I dated her son for a short period of time in High School. I convinced him to absconded with her beef stroganoff recipe. Shhh... I giggle a bit every time I look at it in my recipe box. I have never even told my mom what we did for fear of imprisonment or something.
On the other side of things, when my husband and I had been dating for a while I asked his mother to teach me how to make his favorite steak pie when she was visiting. She told me "No, If I show you that what will he need me for?" A few years later she invited me in the kitchen when she was preparing it. She claims to have no memory of refusing to let me in on the secret before.
Back to the topic at hand...since there were no carefully guarded recipes in my family, I am with those who are not at all inclined to carefully guard anything I am lucky enough come up with.
There are a handful of photographs, but almost exclusively of the final product, rarely additional imagery showing mise en place, preparation steps, alternate plating ideas, despite the ubiquity of smartphones, digital cameras, and other gadgets that could easily capture such moments in their test kitchen. This Almighty Word Worship bias isn't unique to this site; many other food sites are essentially text factories as well.
Here's an example of a recipe from another site:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/08/how-to-make-basic-fresh-tomato-puree-sauce-coulis.html
Not only does it have a photo of the final product, but six other images on the same page, many showing intermediate steps. That old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is true.
I find that the some of the best food writers are ones who also cook live in front of a camera. Julia Child is the quintessential example of this. Yes, Julia wrote some classic cookbooks, but her on-air appearances are really what turned her into an institution. Her episodes on Jacques Pepin's show are priceless. Julia correctly understood that video simulated the real world learning process for 99.99% of all cooks through human history.
One of genius decisions was to *air* mistakes. She would screw up occasionally and just laugh it off because THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS IN REAL KITCHENS. I wish more cooks would show their mistakes, whether it be in print, photographed or videotaped. As much as it helps saying what you need to do, the adage of "learning from your mistakes" is not an artificial phrase. Sometimes it really helps to say, "here's the mistake I made, and if you do you the same thing, here's what you will end up with" and show the disaster.
Today, I think some of the best food educators are the ones who appear on camera as well as write books: Aaron Franklin and Mario Batali are two greats.
Heck, Vivian Howard of PBS series "A Chef's Life" hasn't even published a cookbook, and yet her TV series is undeniably one of the best examples of food education produced in the past twenty years, and yes, that includes deadtrees cookbooks. Like Julia, every one of Howard's episodes has Vivian working with someone else (typically a home cook) and she is not afraid to show her mistakes and/or ignorance. I learn way more from video.
Of course, every site is free to create their own editorial direction. Clearly, this site is a writers' place. Sure, I'm enjoying it for now however there's a lot this site does not offer. I'm an Internet nomad so soon I move along.
Anyhow, there are no secret recipes in my family either, not that they wrote down many of them (basically they're all baking recipes).
Again, these are individual decisions about the editorial direction of any given site, but when you find yourself at a site that includes multiple shots of preparation steps and video, well, it's clear how much is missing at other sites that omit such content.
I've been on the web since the Nineties and it's so peculiar how few food lovers really get the medium.
People are eager to whip out a phone for a selfie, yet lack the foresight to take a quick image of their mise en place or key steps in food preparation?
So odd.
1 pound dry baby lima beans
3 teaspoons salt
½ cup butter
¾ cup light brown sugar
1 tablespoon dried mustard
2 tablespoons molasses
1 cup sour cream
Soak beans overnight. Drain and cover with fresh water. Add 2 teaspoons salt. Boil very gently for 45 minutes or until just tender. Drain and place in a bean pot or casserole. Add remaining salt, brown sugar, mustard, and molasses. Melt butter and add. Stir gently. Stir in sour cream gently. Bake 1 hour at 350F.
(I confess that I think they're too sweet and would cut the sugar. But that's me; the recipe as is was very popular in the 1960s.)
I've put this on my must-make list for the holiday season that lies ahead. Thank you so much for posting it. ;o)
Both my parent swear that my cooking tastes just like my different grandmothers. One Italian, one French.
Both parents insisted that they asked their mothers for recipes and both said there wasn't a recipe, you just cook. But the watched and write down their favorites many times. But they never taste quite right. But mine are perfect. They insist I have some hidden cookbook, they are only half serious. And they try to write my recipes, but I have only ever used recipes as guidelines. And I NEVER measure. I guess my grandmother just taught me cooking instict.
The written recipe gradually emerged in the late nineteenth century, but as you have experienced, many people throughout the twentieth century who simply cooked like centuries before.
Heck, I'm guessing that there are at least a billion cooks on this planet today who don't open a recipe box, cookbook, or web browser to figure out how to cook dinner.
Personally, I think the written recipe can be a crutch. It helps with consistency if it can be executed reliably with similar ingredients each times. For sure, written recipes aren't necessarily better than what's in a good cook's head and you've discovered that.
I know this site is operated by a bunch of nice folks who worship the Almighty Written Word, but that's simply not how humans cooked for the majority of our species' existence on this planet.
For the unwritten recipes, it is more important to watch and remember. That's how many great cooks learned, by watching older family members in the kitchen.
The only recipes I will absolutely never part with (I may give them to my child, if I have one) are some phenomenal-yet-simple French/Belgian baking recipes that my mentor gave to me. Things like lemon madeleine, canelé, brioche, pastry cream, lemon cream, chocolate-orange moelleux, Belgian rye bread, and puff pastry. Things that may seem basic, but are quite unique!
However, the idea that a certain recipe can be only made well by one person, that it's their signature and unrepeatable is well founded. Daniel brings up a strawberry jam, and I would say my mothers strawberry jam is better than mine even though we use the same recipe. Her strawberry patch is between apple trees in England. Mine is at the end of a tomato bed in Illinois. Hers is made to use up a surplus of berries, mine is made to remind me of home. Her sense of taste is different to mine, her experience in jam making far greater. So the same recipe doesn't produce the same jam, but each is ours.
I'm always happy to share a recipe and when asked a secret, the answer's normally a splash of bourbon.
While I make some of my mother's classic dishes, mine are a bit different (I wouldn't say not as good, just different.) As I get older I find I tweak some of these recipes more and more to take advantage of ingredients that weren't available back then or just to suit my personal tastes. And sometimes I come across a better way to do something or a superior ingredient and it's really an improvement. My sister makes some of the same recipes but they never taste the same as mine or my mother's. I think that's what I like about cooking so much - it's really a very personal thing and food often reflects the personality of the cook.
Unsurprisingly, French cuisine has earned a spot on UNESCO's "intangible" cultural heritage list.