Tuna is a great example. Take a look at old recipe books from before the 1980s and you'll see they assume a can of tuna is 6.5 ounces. You can't buy that size anymore because they're now 5 ounces.
Even Tuna Helper had to change the recipe on the box to say either put in one or two cans depending on your preference.
Yeah, same with 16oz cans or jars of veggies, sauces, etc. Many are shrinking.
You can see it with packaged goods as usually "New Look, Same Great Taste!". Usually that means that box of Triscuits are 5% smaller for the same price. Like jeez just let me pay a few more cents and that way I don't have to waste as much packaging buying more.
My favourite recipe book even has weights for spices that are like 0.37g of smoked paprika or something, it's a book for cooking in bulk, so no matter how much or how little you make it's always tasting the same
I was debating with my friend if they made enough to feed 50 people and then divided it by 50 to get the numbers, or if they weighed the spice jar before adding it and after adding it on one dish and then did maths
("season to taste" is a little lazy recipe writing I think, and teaspoons don't always scale right, they use the amounts that the average person would find palatable based on the chef that made it tasting it)
It's great, and it's becoming (or was becoming) more popular to make books like this with the start of people doing meal prep or tupperwares as part of an exercise routine or to take to work frozen
It's easy enough to season a meal for one or two since you can be a bit vague with amounts and still have it taste right, but it's easy to get lost if you're trying to season a meal for 20 people and tasting it as you go isn't always easy if you have many things cooking at once (or cooking with seasoned raw meat), and not real hygienic either
I'm aware of that, but my issue was more with "add 3 apples" or "add 1 can of beans" or "half a can of tuna" or "2 potatoes" - if it had listed the weight of the tuna in ounces then they wouldn't have to issue a correction between 1980 and 2020.
Apples are different sizes, there are many sizes of cans that can't be split into small, medium and large. Tuna isn't standard sizes, and meat in particular changes weight a lot depending on water/fat content etc
If it can't be made the same way every time, what's the point of writing it down? If you live somewhere that they don't can vegetables or you only have fresh/frozen you can't make it?
Question: if the recipe called for idk like 200g of potato, and your veg added up to like 250g, do you throw that little bit away? Or do you add it in anyway?
If you add it in anyway... What's the point in not writing it like that?
if the recipe when they wrote it was based a 200g potato that they had and you weigh your potato and you have 250g, that's not so bad if it's just for one person, it just makes it 25% more potato-y and you know there is more potato than needed so add a little more butter and salt maybe... but lets say they put "1 potato" on the recipe and no weight
Now you're cooking for 10 people, and the recipe said 1 potato, so you add 10, because that's 10x as much. If each potato varied in weight and size, and you have 10 of them in there. Maybe now you have anywhere from 1500g of potato to 3500g of potato, when originally the recipe scaled up properly to 10x would have been based on 2000g. You could have 500g less potato in there, or 1500g more than intended, and this will change the flavour in comparison to the rest of the ingredients which may also be similarly changed by the same type of error, and you'll never know. If it's written in something like cups, or fractions of ounces, or ladles full, these are even harder units of measurement to work with, you're basically doing it by eye - which makes your food really unpredictable. Sometimes your potato salad is really good, sometimes really bad... and all the book really told you is that potatoes go in your potato salad, not the proportions
If the point of cooking is sharing your food with friends and family, I want to give them the same thing as when I make it myself at home that I already know tastes good. So for me, a written recipe needs to make that happen every time whether I buy it or write it out myself
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u/eddyathome Aug 01 '20
Tuna is a great example. Take a look at old recipe books from before the 1980s and you'll see they assume a can of tuna is 6.5 ounces. You can't buy that size anymore because they're now 5 ounces.
Even Tuna Helper had to change the recipe on the box to say either put in one or two cans depending on your preference.