17 ms·

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks

161 points by TangerineDream 2y ago

Seattle3503 2y ago
Published cookbooks may become more valuable as the internet becomes filled with questionable AI recipes.
- matrss 2y ago
  Until the "published cookbooks" market is flooded with AI generated bullshit. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514
jaystraw 2y ago
my birthday's tomorrow, and a friend said she'd make me any desert i wanted. i knew exactly what i wanted: my grandma's creme de menthe cake. i hadn't seen the recipe in a couple of years -- her handwritten notes made my heart smile and ache. ellybaa might not be here anymore, but she lives on <3
petee 2y ago
Mom had started writing a small history book for our family, documenting a mix recipes and stories from her grandmother and others. We also got some photos of the houses they grew up in, and a couple landmarks. I thought it was a great way to make both topics interesting, and something worth keeping. Shes a teacher, so she printed and bound the books for Christmas gifts
- macintux 2y ago
  I grew up in a small family that didn't place any emphasis on cooking, so it took me a long time to realize just how significant recipes were to many family traditions. That does sound like a terrific way to carry on the family history, especially in a world where families are increasingly geographically distributed.
AntiEgo 2y ago
A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan. Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it. I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital. What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure... (Edit: formatting)
- batch12 2y ago
  Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..
  - terrabitz 2y ago
    I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Why not just put your recipies in a text editor and then use git?
j7ake 2y ago
Cookbooks are very western culture specific. Ask Asian (Thai, Korean, Chinese) families and youll notice fewer cookbooks used. They don’t cook with a recipe as often and information is passed by word of mouth. A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe. My favorite webseries for Japanese home cooking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog
- syncbehind 2y ago
  As an Asian who definitely has no family cookbooks to fall back on, It definitely is a project to get things written. It's a tragedy that knowledge passed down for generations get lost because inbetween generations placed no value in cooking.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    This is exactly why anything important should be written down: you can't trust random specific people to value that knowledge. Whatever it is that you value, you can't trust that your kids will value it too, and in fact, they usually don't.
    - mathgeek 2y ago
      From experience, I can promise you that even if kids value their parents’ and grandparents’ recipes, things that are written down get lost, thrown away, or not remembered it’s too late. Making backups is important whether it’s in writing or another format.
nestes 2y ago
Five or six years ago my family started went through all the old recipes - from old newspapers, cookbooks, etc. that were in homes across my extended family. They then decided on which to keep, and printed a new cookbook from the compilation of these recipes. Now if we find (or author) a recipe that we really like, we send it, with any additional annotations, to my parents so that they can include it in the next print edition. It's a relatively time-intensive and expensive process, but from this point forward we should be able to maintain our family's recipes in a physical, living document form. Maybe we don't get the yellowed pages and flour from grandma's hands on the cover, but I think it's a good system.
- bbkane 2y ago
  I've been doing this, but on my personal blog ( https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ ). I'm really glad I got to get some of these from my grandma before she passed, and it's been a huge hit to just send a link when someone wants a recipe.
crabbone 2y ago
Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particular. * Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it. * Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that. * Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book... ---- It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother). I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.
- inanutshellus 2y ago
MegaDeKay 2y ago
My mom is getting up there in years so whenever she comes to visit, I make a point of cooking up some of our favorites from when I lived at home many (many) years ago. Her "recipes" are that in name only - lacking key preparation details, changes to ingredient amounts ("I never used that much sugar"), zero mention of cooking times or temperatures, etc. I'm lucky that her memory is still very sharp so she still remembers all of that missing information. We make the recipe as a "mother - son project" and I take detailed notes along the way so I'll be able to recreate myself the food I remember eating growing up. We have a great time doing it too and it brings back lots of good memories in the process. Most importantly, I don't want to say down the road that "I wish I had the recipe for those cookies but now it is too late". We nailed the poppy seed squares, the perogies are still a work in progress (the recipe was a little too vague even for her), and dumplings are next.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  > the perogies are still a work in progress Let us know when you nail it. I love a good pierogi :-)
swozey 2y ago
Has anyone gone from absolutely hating cooking to enjoying it? I just don't enjoy the process of it. I've done cooking classes, blue apron sort of stuff, etc. I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who loved baking or cooking. My pet theory is my ADHD turns what some people see as a therapeutic maybe meditative (as I've had someone put it) alone time in the kitchen to me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc. But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet. Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
- xkcd-sucks 2y ago
  The key to enjoying it is (1) really caring about eating good food and (2) deeply feeling how absolutely horseshit the cost of good pre-prepared food is. After a while the cooking part just becomes instinct and muscle memory, and repetition/practice is the key to that
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Amen. A single $15 restaurant serving of Thai curry, for example, is enough to pay for a whole pot with 5-6 servings at home using the exact same curry paste and coconut milk that the restaurants use. For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area. Costco chicken breasts are consistently $3 per pound and sous vide makes it foolproof. Shrimp is $5 per pound on sale (make sure to check weekly ads!). If you want to splurge, get a big tenderloin, salmon, or some jumbo shrimp for $10 per pound. Entire meals can be had for less than the delivery fee and tip on a single entree. You can even make entire meals just from the vegetable and meat scraps! If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados. It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.
makeitdouble 2y ago
The historical value of cookbook would definitely merit more attention. It's a window into what ingredients people valued in day to day life, what was seen as luxury, what tastes were in fashion etc., and it's a way more reliable source that newspapers or fancy interviews when it comes to normal people's life. A side note on blog and internet recipes: there are modern cookbooks that have reliable and well made recipes that reduce the need to sift trough inane web pages. For French cooking, Robuchon's books are surprisingly simple and approachable, with solid no-fuss traditional recipes. One could expect more fanciness for a top French chef, but his recipes are really down to earth, straight to the point and well adjusted for anyone cooking a diner for themselves or their family.
- hommelix 2y ago
  Adding Ginette Mathiot's "Je sais cuisiner" to French cookbook classics. Used by multiple generations.
bovermyer 2y ago
The Culinaria cookbooks (if you can find them) are amazing. Not only are they full of recipes, but they also explain the culture surrounding the food in question.
rlonstein 2y ago
Apropos, I have one of my grandmother's boxes of recipes on index cards somewhere. She was a great cook but her notes are, aside from being in mixed German and English, nearly useless because the amounts are "some", "a bit", "a spoonful", "a glass", or "a handful". Whose hand? She was tiny, a 1950's size 8 would have been a tent on her. I save it for the memory of those meals.
- LargeWu 2y ago
  I think one thing that was implied was that the reader already knows how to cook. Since none of the measurements were standard (even things that have measurements - 3 cups of flour measured by weight can vary significantly from person to person) it was understood that whoever is making the recipe knows what a dough should look like, or what a batter's viscosity should be, and make the proper adjustments according to their own needs.
- clutchdude 2y ago
  At some point, you just try to make it with whatever you think "a handful" is and measure when you do. If you fail, you note and adjust. After a while, you know that it's situational - unless it's salt or leavening agents(yeast, baking powder, etc.), there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust things.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- sandworm101 2y ago
  Worse yet, some aspects of old recipes have objectively changed over time. Eggs are bigger. Staples like salt and flour is more homogenous. Our cookware is also different. Much of the stuff we get away with today on non-stick cookware required much more skill and attention in the past.
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Even recent recipes have issues as shrinkflation and corporate food chemistry have both changed pre-made boxed ingredients for specific recipes. A box of cake mix today usually yields a softer crumb than a box of cake mix from 20 years ago. It's also smaller.

Published cookbooks may become more valuable as the internet becomes filled with questionable AI recipes.

matrss 2y ago
Until the "published cookbooks" market is flooded with AI generated bullshit. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514

my birthday's tomorrow, and a friend said she'd make me any desert i wanted. i knew exactly what i wanted: my grandma's creme de menthe cake. i hadn't seen the recipe in a couple of years -- her handwritten notes made my heart smile and ache. ellybaa might not be here anymore, but she lives on <3

petee 2y ago

Mom had started writing a small history book for our family, documenting a mix recipes and stories from her grandmother and others. We also got some photos of the houses they grew up in, and a couple landmarks. I thought it was a great way to make both topics interesting, and something worth keeping. Shes a teacher, so she printed and bound the books for Christmas gifts

macintux 2y ago
I grew up in a small family that didn't place any emphasis on cooking, so it took me a long time to realize just how significant recipes were to many family traditions. That does sound like a terrific way to carry on the family history, especially in a world where families are increasingly geographically distributed.

AntiEgo 2y ago

A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan. Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it. I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital. What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure... (Edit: formatting)

batch12 2y ago
Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..
- terrabitz 2y ago
  I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Why not just put your recipies in a text editor and then use git?

j7ake 2y ago

Cookbooks are very western culture specific. Ask Asian (Thai, Korean, Chinese) families and youll notice fewer cookbooks used. They don’t cook with a recipe as often and information is passed by word of mouth. A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe. My favorite webseries for Japanese home cooking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog

syncbehind 2y ago
As an Asian who definitely has no family cookbooks to fall back on, It definitely is a project to get things written. It's a tragedy that knowledge passed down for generations get lost because inbetween generations placed no value in cooking.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  This is exactly why anything important should be written down: you can't trust random specific people to value that knowledge. Whatever it is that you value, you can't trust that your kids will value it too, and in fact, they usually don't.
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    From experience, I can promise you that even if kids value their parents’ and grandparents’ recipes, things that are written down get lost, thrown away, or not remembered it’s too late. Making backups is important whether it’s in writing or another format.

nestes 2y ago

Five or six years ago my family started went through all the old recipes - from old newspapers, cookbooks, etc. that were in homes across my extended family. They then decided on which to keep, and printed a new cookbook from the compilation of these recipes. Now if we find (or author) a recipe that we really like, we send it, with any additional annotations, to my parents so that they can include it in the next print edition. It's a relatively time-intensive and expensive process, but from this point forward we should be able to maintain our family's recipes in a physical, living document form. Maybe we don't get the yellowed pages and flour from grandma's hands on the cover, but I think it's a good system.

bbkane 2y ago
I've been doing this, but on my personal blog ( https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ ). I'm really glad I got to get some of these from my grandma before she passed, and it's been a huge hit to just send a link when someone wants a recipe.

crabbone 2y ago

Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particular. * Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it. * Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that. * Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book... ---- It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother). I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.

inanutshellus 2y ago

MegaDeKay 2y ago

My mom is getting up there in years so whenever she comes to visit, I make a point of cooking up some of our favorites from when I lived at home many (many) years ago. Her "recipes" are that in name only - lacking key preparation details, changes to ingredient amounts ("I never used that much sugar"), zero mention of cooking times or temperatures, etc. I'm lucky that her memory is still very sharp so she still remembers all of that missing information. We make the recipe as a "mother - son project" and I take detailed notes along the way so I'll be able to recreate myself the food I remember eating growing up. We have a great time doing it too and it brings back lots of good memories in the process. Most importantly, I don't want to say down the road that "I wish I had the recipe for those cookies but now it is too late". We nailed the poppy seed squares, the perogies are still a work in progress (the recipe was a little too vague even for her), and dumplings are next.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
> the perogies are still a work in progress Let us know when you nail it. I love a good pierogi :-)

swozey 2y ago

Has anyone gone from absolutely hating cooking to enjoying it? I just don't enjoy the process of it. I've done cooking classes, blue apron sort of stuff, etc. I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who loved baking or cooking. My pet theory is my ADHD turns what some people see as a therapeutic maybe meditative (as I've had someone put it) alone time in the kitchen to me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc. But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet. Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.

xkcd-sucks 2y ago
The key to enjoying it is (1) really caring about eating good food and (2) deeply feeling how absolutely horseshit the cost of good pre-prepared food is. After a while the cooking part just becomes instinct and muscle memory, and repetition/practice is the key to that
- throwup238 2y ago
  Amen. A single $15 restaurant serving of Thai curry, for example, is enough to pay for a whole pot with 5-6 servings at home using the exact same curry paste and coconut milk that the restaurants use. For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area. Costco chicken breasts are consistently $3 per pound and sous vide makes it foolproof. Shrimp is $5 per pound on sale (make sure to check weekly ads!). If you want to splurge, get a big tenderloin, salmon, or some jumbo shrimp for $10 per pound. Entire meals can be had for less than the delivery fee and tip on a single entree. You can even make entire meals just from the vegetable and meat scraps! If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados. It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.

makeitdouble 2y ago

The historical value of cookbook would definitely merit more attention. It's a window into what ingredients people valued in day to day life, what was seen as luxury, what tastes were in fashion etc., and it's a way more reliable source that newspapers or fancy interviews when it comes to normal people's life. A side note on blog and internet recipes: there are modern cookbooks that have reliable and well made recipes that reduce the need to sift trough inane web pages. For French cooking, Robuchon's books are surprisingly simple and approachable, with solid no-fuss traditional recipes. One could expect more fanciness for a top French chef, but his recipes are really down to earth, straight to the point and well adjusted for anyone cooking a diner for themselves or their family.

hommelix 2y ago
Adding Ginette Mathiot's "Je sais cuisiner" to French cookbook classics. Used by multiple generations.

bovermyer 2y ago

The Culinaria cookbooks (if you can find them) are amazing. Not only are they full of recipes, but they also explain the culture surrounding the food in question.

rlonstein 2y ago

Apropos, I have one of my grandmother's boxes of recipes on index cards somewhere. She was a great cook but her notes are, aside from being in mixed German and English, nearly useless because the amounts are "some", "a bit", "a spoonful", "a glass", or "a handful". Whose hand? She was tiny, a 1950's size 8 would have been a tent on her. I save it for the memory of those meals.

LargeWu 2y ago
I think one thing that was implied was that the reader already knows how to cook. Since none of the measurements were standard (even things that have measurements - 3 cups of flour measured by weight can vary significantly from person to person) it was understood that whoever is making the recipe knows what a dough should look like, or what a batter's viscosity should be, and make the proper adjustments according to their own needs.
clutchdude 2y ago
At some point, you just try to make it with whatever you think "a handful" is and measure when you do. If you fail, you note and adjust. After a while, you know that it's situational - unless it's salt or leavening agents(yeast, baking powder, etc.), there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust things.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sandworm101 2y ago
Worse yet, some aspects of old recipes have objectively changed over time. Eggs are bigger. Staples like salt and flour is more homogenous. Our cookware is also different. Much of the stuff we get away with today on non-stick cookware required much more skill and attention in the past.
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  Even recent recipes have issues as shrinkflation and corporate food chemistry have both changed pre-made boxed ingredients for specific recipes. A box of cake mix today usually yields a softer crumb than a box of cake mix from 20 years ago. It's also smaller.