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The people who say that about younger women probably had Grandmas who were still in households that could be sustained on a single income.
Not saying it was ideal that their only choice was homemaking, but it stands to reason that a more significant amount of them got good at cooking and baking.
It can’t be overstated how many of those recipes were some con to sell canned shit that Grandma cut out of a magazine. There’s very little “in the old county we cooked like this…” that made it through the Boomer food filter. Best case scenario is it’s Betty fucking Crocker.
Both my grandmothers were great cooks. I guess I had a lucky childhood in that regards.
In her defense, we’re quickly approaching the point where the only food we’ll be able to afford is depression era food. Welcome back to splitting one streak between 7 people and water pie.
I grew up in the 70s with casseroles that would make your god cry.
If I’m diagnosed with cancer, I’m blaming old-timey cooking. Some things should be left in the past.
When I was in high school my older brother brought a cookbook with recipes from around the world. I tried to make couple that were fairly easy to make and was amazed by the taste. I couldn’t believe food can have that much flavor. I later realized it’s not that the recipes was so special. My mother’s food was simply very bland. Not bad, but it was just variations of salt and sour. I don’t make or miss any of her recipes. She makes very good deserts tough.
Yeah, even just having more different ingredients and spices available makes those recipes of old somewhat obsolete. But then you also have the internet to tell you all kinds of new recipes, so if the local cuisine isn’t great to begin with, it is easier than ever to not bother with it.
I have three sets of grandparents. Only remember one of my granddads cooking, one of my granddads would bake.
Dad and granddad (his step dad) were the consistent, enjoyed cooking and playing with flavours cooks in the family 😅 none of the women in my family, including me, enjoy it other than my sister maybe!
My grandma hand-wrote down all her recipes for her daughters before she died. A few years ago I decided a nice gift for all of them would be to transcribe the recipes into a printed book. While trancribing the recipes I realized that 80% of her dishes were just variations of ground beef, cream of mushroom soup, oleo, and shredded cheese.
I would bet you money that is you search for the exact recipes online or in some newspaper archive, a fair number would pop up as having been published elsewhere first.
My grandmother would put food in the oven before turning it on. When the timer would go off, she’d be frustrated that the food was dehydrated and undercooked, so she’d try her best to salvage it by starting the timer again for the same amount of time. Then she’d ask “what smells funny?” before pulling the food out from the oven, and complaining that the recipe was bad.
She never cooked before she got married, but she was married for somewhere around 70 years.
70 years.
In 70 years, she was never able to understand the concept of preheating the oven. When I was a child, she’d come over to my parents’ house. If my mom was preparing dinner, and the oven was preheating, my grandmother would turn off the oven and tell my mother that she shouldn’t leave the oven on. My mom tried so many times to explain preheating the oven, but my grandmother insisted that it was a waste of energy.
that’s not a waste of energy, but i bet there was also other habit that is: unless you want to specifically evaporate water, things will get boiled just the same on low or high heat. (heating up to boiling point is most economical using high power) there’s zero reason to keep thing boiling on high heat then add water. also, using hot tap water. water heater is much better at heating water than open gas flame, yet i see people insisting on heating entire pots and kettles of cold tap water
Sounds like granny was a full blown dumbass.
Or had early onset Alzheimer’s. Or both.
I had an elderly aunt that made “oyster stew” on special occasions. The recipe was as follows:
One gallon of 2% milk
One 16 oz. jar raw oysters with juice
Salt and pepper to tasteThat’s literally all that was in it. She’d mix it together, heat until steaming, then serve. Just a big pot of hot, oyster scented, salty milk, served with oyster crackers. Everyone hated it and none of her children carried on the tradition.
That recipe deserved to die.
Edit: oops, broken line breaks.
Oyster milk! It’s fight milk but you get a refreshing seaside holiday while you drink it
It’s fight milk
I didn’t see any crow eggs in the recipe.
…oh my g*d what a horrible day to have eyes…
Your god, maybe.
The god of chaos demands at oyster milk sacrifice!
My dad couldn’t cook rice for shit. Always put way too much water in the rice cooker. On his last Thanksgiving, he made rice with something that turned it pink, honest to God not sure if he used food dye or something else.
And I’m convinced my hatred of liver ties back to how he’d drop beef liver in various soups. I’d never know if the meat I was biting into was goat, turkey or liver until it was too late.
He also gave us food poisoning twice. Yeah, he was a shit cook. Fortunately his cooking died with him.
Might’ve been beetroot. It’s excellent at coloring things pink and also used as a food dye…
Turns out I don’t actually dislike vegetables, I just dislike how my mother’s and grandmother make them. Did you know they can be served with colour still on them?
Turns out I love Brussels sprouts, so long as you don’t cook them til they’re grey.
Also, the new cultivars are WAY less bitter. You can still grow the old type yourself at home, and it’s really a huge difference.
Frozen is way better than canned
Canned veggies aren’t that bad. But my mom used to treat them like they fresh.
So instead of just warming them up in the liquid, she would rinse them, then boil them like normal (which was already too long).
Do you mean to tell me vegetables can be cooked some other way besides boiling? And you can put seasoning on them?!? My grandfather would be disgusted by the thought.
Even boiled vegetables taste good if you don’t go stupid mode about it.
I got fucking microwave steamed frozen veggies with no seasoning at all not even butter and if I didn’t eat the freezer burnt slop I wasn’t allowed to leave the table.
Trauma bonding hell yeah. 👊
I get the microwaved steamed veggies now. But I at least toss them in some olive oil or butter and season them. Usually I’ll microwave them halfway to thaw them then fry them in some oil to get a nicer char. Not gourmet, but perfectly fine.
I used to stir fry my veggies, but they’d end up soft due to the resulting moisture.
Then I baked them in the oven hoping that’d be better, but I’d overcook them just a bit and they’d be too hard.
I finally decided to air fry my veggies, and they were juuuuuuuuuuuuust right!
Boggles my mind oven roasted asparagus and broccoli were not a thing as a child.
Church potluck every Sunday when I was a kid. A whole buffet line of jello based not dessert dishes. Usually peas in green jello, shredded carrots in orange jello,or hotdog in jello abominations. If not jello, there were at least 10 mayonnaise based atrocities.
I ate a lot of dinner rolls.
I’ve always thought this was some sort of mass hysteria. Who ate any of that stuff and thought “oh, hell yeah, so good”? Who would make it twice? Let alone more?
Mayonnaise PLUS jello, with hotdogs. Perfect.
I still can’t do potlucks because my parents forced me to eat all sorts of random bullshit at the church potluck, because they felt like being seen eating someone’s dish conferred some weird church status.
“Go over and tell Miss Borley how much you liked her chicken liver and salmon casserole.”
On the other hand, this also contributed to my powerful disdain for church, so I guess that’s something. The only way out is through… a senile lady’s disgusting casserole, or something.
“Go over and tell Miss Borley how much you liked her chicken liver and salmon casserole.”
Okay, Mommy!
goes over and vomits all over Miss Borley
Sometimes the holy spirit just moves through you.
I was a stubbornly picky eater. So thankfully my parents never made me do that, as I would have simply accepted a punishment rather than take a bite of any of that shit.
God, I feel for you folk. When my parents forced me to try something, it was like sushi, fried okra, or pesto.
In defense of my old church:
Pizza biscuits.
Get Pillsbury biscuit dough, slap down one, slap down mozzarella, marinara, pepperoni/sausage, slap down another biscuit over top, do this 12 times, cover and bake.
Sorta like a poor man’s calzone… or, arguably, they’re just super sized pizza pockets.
Don’t pair well with grape juice imo, but they were honestly pretty good.
We did eventually get an Italian soda station bar type thing, no clue if we just aped that from the Mormons or came up with it independently.
Dude! We made those exact pizzas as kids after temple. They were quite good.
Ahem.
Cheesus Crust.
That is all.
I would have eaten those for sure.
Apparently I missed out. Post church social time was coffee and pastries. The big meals were normal (turkey with mash, green beans, and cranberry sauce, for example).
But I’ve read the cookbooks.
My grandma wouldn’t give me her recipe for my favorite dessert and she died:( My aunts try to reassure me by saying she probably didn’t have a recipe she probably felt it out.
my grandma’s famous brownies turned out to be box mix with chopped walnuts added 😂 and the box mix ingredients changed so they’re just not the same anymore.
i came up with my own deeply indulgent recipe that i prefer anyways.
When I asked for the recipe (fudge) my grandma legit sent me a cutout from the back of a marshmallow fluff jar. I am 100% certain that’s not the recipe she used.
No, there’s a very real chance that’s actually it. People get their recipes from somewhere. She wasn’t some confectioner, inventing recipes from scratch.
You don’t know her
You might have been provided a “less-ipe”. In communities where recipes are closely guarded, social pressures may force one to share what would be a personal secret. So they give an adulterated version ensuring only they, the original recipe holder can produce the beloved result.
God people are stupid. Oh no. Can’t give or my special recipe! No one will remember me!
It’s very likely:( I know some people who are holding out on their kids for that reason.
i actually “caught” my grandma using the box mix. my aunt, her daughter, acted like i was foolish for being surprised 🤷🏻
That’s some pretty solid evidence. Caught in the act!
That’s why one day I insisted on standing next to my grandma to take notes. I‘m glad I did because otherwise her „I don’t have a recipe“ noodle dish would have been lost forever.
The secret ingredient was dust, dander, and flop sweat.
Source: my grandmother’s kitchen. No disrespect granny, but your kitchen hygiene was awful.
I wonder if all great cooks “feel it out” or if that’s just something I tell myself to help my disorganized ass sleep at night.
Cooking allows for a lot of “feeling it out”. For example, most spices you aren’t really going to taste a difference between a tsp and a tbsp of the same spice. Just knowing what spices go into the dish you are making can often be enough.
For example, taco seasoning is onions, cumin, oragano, chili pepper, and paprika. By far, the cumin and onions drive the flavor, you could almost leave out everything else. With that in mind, it mostly ends up being just the technique. Brown the onions, toast the spices, brown the meat. The actual amount of spices that goes in won’t make a huge difference one way or another. What does make a difference is if you grind your cumin instead of using preground (that’s true for most seed spices).
Technique is often the most important thing vs exact ingredient measuring. The exception to this is baking. You must measure (preferably by weight) your flour and liquids. You can eventually do it by feel, but it’s hard. You’ll get much better results with a scale. Even then, it’s mostly just the process of targeting the right hydration. 70% does well for a lot of white breads (For every 1 gram of flour add 0.7g of liquid).
Wouldn’t that be 41% hydration? You add 0.7g water to 1g flour, you get 1.7g of dough, 0.7g is about 41% of 1.7g
Nope. You aren’t measuring the percentage of liquid in a dough. You are measuring the percentage of liquid relative to the mass of flour. That’s why you can have 100% or higher hydration doughs.
In actual math, you are correct, but these are baker percentages where flour is always 100% and all other ingredients are relative to the flour.
So a recipe would look like this:
80% White Flour 20% Whole Grain 75% Water 15% Sour Dough Starter 2% Salt
Makes it really simple to scale recipes, you decide how much flour to use, for example 500g ut becomes
400g White Flour 100g Whole Grain 375g Water 75g Sour Dough 10g Salt
Pro tip (really more of an amateur tip): Flour is a natural product that varies widely between different regions and there can be large differences in how much water they can hold and how much protein (gluten) it has. Hold back 10-15% of the water at first and only add it bit by bit when the dough feels dense and you think it (and you) can handle it. My biggest beginner mistakes were definetly trying high hydration doughs without the know how if how to handle such doughs and how to tell wether or not the flour could actually hold on to that much water. 65% Hydration can make apso make a dope loaf
Oh that does actually make things much easier since the real percentage is much harder to track once you have several ingredients.
Yeah, and even when you do taste a difference, it’s rarely actually bad. Usually, it’s just a different hint of something in the overall taste. If you make the dish often, those variations are actually good, because it makes it more interesting.
Thank you for the best and simplest explanation of doing __% hydration for dough that I’ve seen.
No problem. I’ve definitely seen a lot of baking articles that somehow try and make this simple concept unbelievably convoluted.
The only other thing to know is that 1 mL of water = 1 gram of water. Which means 170g of water == 170 mL of water (At STP… blah blah blah. It’s not super important to hit exactly 70% you can hit 75% or 65% and you’ll be fine. It’s close enough to true).
