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Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I a

Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume. She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility. Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.

Balgair 1y ago
Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?! Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.
- striking 1y ago
  Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...
  - pests 1y ago
    Link for the lazy: https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order?variant=40552608923728 https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order... $17 for a single fruit!
    - kemayo 1y ago
      Lucille Bluth underestimated, it turns out! (Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        Nah, that's inflation.
      - dghlsakjg 1y ago
        She was dead on if you account for inflation. $10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.
  - ggm 1y ago
    They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason. Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
  - Larrikin 1y ago
    Wow this site is great, definitely a new go to for gifts. Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- scheme271 1y ago
  I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
frainfreeze 1y ago
Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?
zurtri 1y ago
Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.
- e28eta 1y ago
  I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes. The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
  - al_borland 1y ago
    This is very interesting. I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods. I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home. If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
    - mgiampapa 1y ago
      My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef. I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.
Blahah 1y ago
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
- tbcj 1y ago
  Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.
deleted 1y ago
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airstrike 1y ago
Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.
  - dolmen 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248272
- mathgeek 1y ago
  > Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.
dfxm12 1y ago
She's upset that the recipes are different If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway. When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.
- js2 1y ago
  > When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes: "The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode: https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45 https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45
- pcl 1y ago
  I have a professional cookbook like this Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.
- bb88 1y ago
  That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights. I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.
joshstrange 1y ago
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.
- klaff 1y ago
  I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
  - eesmith 1y ago
    Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/mode/2up?q=meszoly https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
The28thDuck 1y ago
When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.
sniffers 1y ago
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nvader 1y ago
After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-instant-mashed https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst... This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
- FearNotDaniel 1y ago
  Yes, except for this part: > The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
  - closewith 1y ago
    Yes, it was a straight genocide, of the kind so common in territories that were subject to crown control.
    - FearNotDaniel 1y ago
      I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people. It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.
encoderer 1y ago
I tried my best to update several of my family recipes. A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”. This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?
- waste_monk 1y ago
  >This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905? This site [1] has some interesting info: [1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight." ---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67) With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg). [1] https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html
  - saalweachter 1y ago
    That "approximately" is too approximate. 2.125 lb / 20 is 1.7 oz, which is very different than 2 oz when it comes to eggs -- egg sizes (in the US) are by the quarter-ounce, the difference between the two is two egg sizes. (Which is how the problem in the article was solved -- eggs are now sold by weight, indirectly, because egg sizes are determined by weight, and you now buy boxes of eggs of a specific size.) So the average egg in 1886 in that article would be classed as "small" today.
  - dolmen 1y ago
    As "egg-sized" refers to volume, what quantity of butter would that be?
- tetha 1y ago
ajross 1y ago
[flagged]
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update. To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly. "Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    But it is. Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother. OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christmas tree, but not something that will evoke those remembrances of being a five-year-old again.
    - justinrubek 1y ago
      How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. Are you all reading your own comments? Their mother can keep using the old version if she wants. It literally doesn't matter.
      - ajross 1y ago
        > How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. It's an affront to tradition. And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread. You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's a misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about What Family Cooking is For, socially.
desi_ninja 1y ago
Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.
- acomjean 1y ago
  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/ Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix
- justsomehnguy 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450 And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-front-line-to-the-freezer-aisle/ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro... If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.
rendaw 1y ago
> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility. Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
jancsika 1y ago
> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years. It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :) Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)
- Freak_NL 1y ago
  > Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.
  - VagabundoP 1y ago
    She archived the repo after that.
- benstein 1y ago
  LOL fork
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read. Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?
- gdbsjjdn 1y ago
  When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.
  - pitched 1y ago
Freak_NL 1y ago
> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume. I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons. I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.
- closewith 1y ago
  You'll need many sets as US cup sizes are different to UK cup sizes and other customary units.
  - Freak_NL 1y ago
    Not at all — just the US cups will do. Modern UK recipes tend to use tablespoons and teaspoons, but not cups.
teekert 1y ago
Hero. I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think. Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe. Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.
sublinear 1y ago
There's a lot of comments on this, but nobody mentioned the similar job of maintaining and auditing an internal package mirror.
mkovach 1y ago
It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!" She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake. Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!" She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life. At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect. Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.
jjkaczor 1y ago
Uh... I would buy this cookbook... I suspect many others would as well...
iamwil 1y ago
Gosh, you need to write a book. Totally serious. Someone needs to document it.
maebert 1y ago
I inherited my great-grandmas recipe book that calls for "50 pence [pfennig] worth of almonds". I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.

Balgair 1y ago

Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?! Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?

AlotOfReading 1y ago
They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.
striking 1y ago
Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...
- pests 1y ago
  Link for the lazy: https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order?variant=40552608923728 https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order... $17 for a single fruit!
  - kemayo 1y ago
    Lucille Bluth underestimated, it turns out! (Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Nah, that's inflation.
    - dghlsakjg 1y ago
      She was dead on if you account for inflation. $10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.
- ggm 1y ago
  They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason. Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  Wow this site is great, definitely a new go to for gifts. Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
scheme271 1y ago
I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

frainfreeze 1y ago

Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?

zurtri 1y ago

Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.

e28eta 1y ago
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes. The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
- al_borland 1y ago
  This is very interesting. I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods. I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home. If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
  - mgiampapa 1y ago
    My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef. I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.

Blahah 1y ago

What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.

tbcj 1y ago
Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

airstrike 1y ago

Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

throwaway173738 1y ago
Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.
- dolmen 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248272
mathgeek 1y ago
> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.

dfxm12 1y ago

She's upset that the recipes are different If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway. When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.

js2 1y ago
> When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes: "The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode: https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45 https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45
pcl 1y ago
I have a professional cookbook like this Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.
Dylan16807 1y ago
Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.
bb88 1y ago
That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights. I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.

joshstrange 1y ago

I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.

klaff 1y ago
I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
- eesmith 1y ago
  Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/mode/2up?q=meszoly https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago

The28thDuck 1y ago

When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.

sniffers 1y ago

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nvader 1y ago

After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-instant-mashed https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst... This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.

FearNotDaniel 1y ago
Yes, except for this part: > The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.
- closewith 1y ago
  Yes, it was a straight genocide, of the kind so common in territories that were subject to crown control.
  - FearNotDaniel 1y ago
    I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people. It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.

encoderer 1y ago

I tried my best to update several of my family recipes. A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”. This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

waste_monk 1y ago
>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905? This site [1] has some interesting info: [1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight." ---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67) With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg). [1] https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html
- saalweachter 1y ago
  That "approximately" is too approximate. 2.125 lb / 20 is 1.7 oz, which is very different than 2 oz when it comes to eggs -- egg sizes (in the US) are by the quarter-ounce, the difference between the two is two egg sizes. (Which is how the problem in the article was solved -- eggs are now sold by weight, indirectly, because egg sizes are determined by weight, and you now buy boxes of eggs of a specific size.) So the average egg in 1886 in that article would be classed as "small" today.
- dolmen 1y ago
  As "egg-sized" refers to volume, what quantity of butter would that be?
tetha 1y ago

ajross 1y ago

[flagged]

Dylan16807 1y ago
The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update. To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly. "Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  But it is. Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother. OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christmas tree, but not something that will evoke those remembrances of being a five-year-old again.
  - justinrubek 1y ago
    How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. Are you all reading your own comments? Their mother can keep using the old version if she wants. It literally doesn't matter.
    - ajross 1y ago
      > How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. It's an affront to tradition. And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread. You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's a misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about What Family Cooking is For, socially.

desi_ninja 1y ago

Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.

acomjean 1y ago
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/ Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix
justsomehnguy 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450 And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.
mathgeek 1y ago
Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-front-line-to-the-freezer-aisle/ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro... If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.

rendaw 1y ago

> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility. Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...

jancsika 1y ago

> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years. It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :) Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)

Freak_NL 1y ago
> Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.
- VagabundoP 1y ago
  She archived the repo after that.
benstein 1y ago
LOL fork
IAmBroom 1y ago
One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read. Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?
gdbsjjdn 1y ago
When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.
- pitched 1y ago

Freak_NL 1y ago

> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume. I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons. I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.

closewith 1y ago
You'll need many sets as US cup sizes are different to UK cup sizes and other customary units.
- Freak_NL 1y ago
  Not at all — just the US cups will do. Modern UK recipes tend to use tablespoons and teaspoons, but not cups.

teekert 1y ago

Hero. I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think. Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe. Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.

sublinear 1y ago

There's a lot of comments on this, but nobody mentioned the similar job of maintaining and auditing an internal package mirror.

mkovach 1y ago

It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!" She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake. Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!" She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life. At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect. Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.

jjkaczor 1y ago

Uh... I would buy this cookbook... I suspect many others would as well...

iamwil 1y ago

Gosh, you need to write a book. Totally serious. Someone needs to document it.

maebert 1y ago

I inherited my great-grandmas recipe book that calls for "50 pence [pfennig] worth of almonds". I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.