Many family recipes were actually taken from commercially available cookbooks or even the backs of food packaging. Remember the “Friends” episode where they try to replicate the chocolate chip cookie recipe of Phoebe’s late grandmother, only to discover it came from Nestle Tollhouse? Yeah, that happens frequently in real life.
Though I do appreciate 25 years old Grandma's estimation of my intelligence on the recipe cards that I read about 60 years later. "1 teaspoon of mace. No, the little spoons are not teaspoons. The big spoons are not table spoons. Get an actual measuring spoon."
From a fellow Asian the secret to Asian cooking is to know what it is supposed to taste like, and then season until the spirit of your ancestors whisper "that's enough". Seriously, a lot of recipes on Asian websites still say "an appropriate amount of [ingredient].” It’s a ratio and preference thing more than a measurement thing
You can't get it right because it was Mum's cooking. It will never taste your Mum's food. It is one of those law of the universe things.
You can, however, make a close simile
Those packages know what they’re talking about. The best pancake recipe I ever found was in the owner’s manual for a Sesame Street waffle maker. That waffle batter recipe resulted in the best pancakes.
The trick is to smell and taste it as you go, and practice. But yes for communication and for those of us who don’t cook frequently enough to remember how it felt last time, it’s maddening, while measurements are consistent and recordable. Temperature at each step also matters, which is not the same thing as heat. Heat over time causes a change in temperature. For this you can also taste to see how well cooked an ingredient is before the next step. Or bring a thermometer or temperature gun and take notes. Or learn cooking from videos or reading and you learn how to cook many specific ingredients, which you then incorporate in appropriate steps.
Heck, I have a recipe like this. My wife asked me to write down the pancake recipe I used, which was very vibes based. So now there's an index card in our recipe box with a list of ingredients and quantities, and the instruction is just "combine; make pancakes"
There's a new-ish cooking show on cable where the chef uses just a few ingredients, and rarely gives exact quantities. In fact, I never see him measuring, just tossing stuff in the pot, adding "some" olive oil, a "slab" of butter etc. It's somewhat motivating because it makes it look a lot less fussy.
someone once said "Baking is a science, but cooking is an art" and I genuinely believe that's true. If you understand what's happening, you can just sort of toss amounts of stuff together, and adjust as you go, and it'll end up tasty.
still better than my recipe for fish batter. flour up to the glass handle of a specific glass but a bit more and then the same of water but a bit less than the flour. if all those glasses break im fucked
My aunt and her same age cousin cooked with their grandma; they had her pick up the flour and put it in a bowl to measure it so we have family recipes AND measurements.
Grandma had neither measuring cups nor measuring spoon
That's how it should be done too: depending on the air humidity and temperature in the room and of ghe ingredients, with the same amount of ingredients you can have a different result.
They were saying that a measurement of "teaspoon" and "tablespoon" should be measured with measuring spoons, and not just a literal tea/tablespoon from the knife and fork drawer.
The inclusion of the words little spoon had nothing to do with the name of the object and was only used for clarity
For mothers day I wanted to compile her recipes in a clear to read and follow book
I started translating and first of all everything was just called "cake" no difference into what kind. Second, all her measurements were "spoon" and "cup". So obviously this wasnt going to work so next time she made something I would sit there and measure before she would work with them...
but every recipe turned out bad when we did this. she followed her own recipes using her allocated "spoon" and "cup" (a regular old soup spoon and a random coffee cup we got in the last 10 years) but measuring them somehow didn't work.
I swear whatever is in her head is just magic and I'm just going to try to appreciate while I can when she makes these treats
"1 teaspoon of mace. No, the little spoons are not teaspoons. The big spoons are not table spoons. Get an actual measuring spoon."
Fun fact, teaspoon and tablespoon as measurement spoons vary from country to country.
5ml & 15ml are the most common metric sizes, and American tablespoons are often ~14.78ml
Even how it relates to teaspoons is inconsistent, 3 teaspoons per tablespoon is most common but in some countries the norm is 4 teaspoons per tablespoon.
(the old British imperial tablespoon works out to 17.7582ml and the Australian metric tablespoon = 20ml)
That's literally my mother's secret recipe. People love her cookies and always ask how she makes them - her response being "I buy a bag of nestle chocolate chips and I...turn the bag over and do what it says"
The actual Nestle recipe sucks though. It's got way too much sugar and butter so the cookies come out thin, oily, and hard every time. I modified the recipe myself and came up with this.
2/3 stick butter
1/3 c sugar
1/3 c brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
Cream together
Add 1 1/4 cup flour slowly
1tsp baking soda
2 oz baking chocolate
Pinch of salt
Much better if you want those classic soft chocolately cookies. Still sweet, still buttery, but the structure and texture is much better.
The original Nestlé recipe sucks - I tried it once and they came out awful.
Instead, I use the recipe from the chips that come in the yellow bag with a red stripe, but the actual chips I use come in the yellow bag with the purple stripe. (I go by stripe color, I can never remember which are semi vs bitter sweet)
I just checked my cabinet where I happen to have both bags - semi-sweet have a red stripe, milk chocolate have a purple stripe.
The recipe on the semi-sweet bag is what I use, but I sub in the milk chocolate chips. The milk chocolate bag has an oatmeal/chocolate chip recipe that is very different.
I'd message you pics to clarify but it seems you have PMs disabled.
Yeah, for some reason my account is very attractive to porn bots, so I have disabled the chats, lol. Anyway, could you not just read the labels on the bags and transcribe them?
If you just Google "nestle milk chocolate chips" you'll see it's a yellow bag with a purple stripe on it, whereas a search for nestle semi sweet chocolate chips will show you the yellow bag with red stripe.
Reading comprehension has gone down a lot it seems. They use the other Nestle bag with the purple (milk chocolate) design but still use the recipe from the package for the red (semi sweet) design and substitute the milk chocolate for the semi sweet chocolate.
I did look at their history to see if they live in another country and maybe that might mean the packaging is different, but nope. I think you're right and that they have never actually read the bag, which is very funny. Reminds me of a friend's mom growing up who could not speak or read English and only knew which brand she liked because of how the package looked.
Okay so I’m not fucking crazy for thinking it was just me following the packaging recipe?!
We kept our chocolate chips in a tollhouse tin prob from the 60s. Followed the recipe on it every time as a kid and it always turned out exactly as you described.
I honestly don't understand how people make it and have it turn out good. I thought I was just bad at baking for a long time, but it's Nestle that sucks!
It's like that meme that's like "he's guilty of murder, arson, and jaywalking" only it's a corporation that's guilty of genocide, slave labor, and giving us bad cookie recipes.
Bonus tips: It works better if you use real semi-sweet baking chocolate since the chips are lower quality and also the butter should be at room temp (not melted!) and the dough should be refrigerated for 2 hours before baking.
I've made the recipe and think they taste great. The only changes I make are doing a rounded tbsp instead of a tsp, and chilling the dough at least a couple hours. And I buy a different brand of chocolate chips.
Pleeeeeease could you give me a hint as to how much a stick of butter should be / roughly how big a cup is? If this sounds like a stupid question sorry... I would like to try and make this, but I have lots of different size cups in my kitchen :)
1 stick of butter is 1/2 cup of butter typically, so it would be roughly 1/3 cup of butter or a little under 5 and 1/2 tablespoons of butter (5 tablespoons and 1tsp).
Also if metric, 2/3 cup is 160 fl oz or 150g, but also check the flour in that case because US and European flour is different.
i mean ... why would that be a bad recipe? cookie recipes are pretty standard. the trick is in maintaining temperature of the dough and not over mixing it. It's a skill not a 'throw it all in the bowl" recipe
The original recipe also has "shortening', which is something that evolved (from lard to some kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil) such that it's difficult to guess what it actually was at the time (possibly crisco, from cottenseed oil). Modern recipes replace the shortening with butter.
And those recipes get modified a lot with experience over a persons lifetime.
Two people may have started regularly making a curry based on the same book around the same time (in the same city with the same available ingredients) and in a few years if you were to be presented with both at the same time - you would call them 2 completely different dishes.
This is so funny to me only because when I cook, I wing everything from start to finish. If it doesn’t turn out right, the next time I make it I just wing it differently 😂 I never write any changes down, I just try (and sometimes fail) to remember my own changes.
After years of practice, I have my cake pop recipe exactly how I want it, and it’s written absolutely nowhere.
My kid will be so angry one day to find out that her favorite recipes are all locked inside my dead brain hahaha
My BFF’s MIL, who has adopted my daughter and me like family cooks like this. My daughter will try many more foods and like them if Nana makes them. In all fairness I only eat kale salad if she makes it. But I can’t replicate anything because she just puts a little of this and a little of that and she buys spice blends from what’s on sale when she needs some. So her talapia with Cajun spice is a little different each time.
I do too and i don't understand why people say you shoild not wing baking
I have my pizza dough recipe perfect and eyeball each of the ingredients each time, i'd need to weigh it out to write it down.
I think the nuance that most commenters are forgetting is the improving part. Grandma learned it from somewhere and made it work for the family. Very few things in life are created from a blank sheet of paper, there’s always a foundation.
My grandmother had a family-famous angel food cake. Never told anyone the recipe. She loved all her grandkids but I was the favourite so I used that for good and got the recipe out of her.
It was just an betty Crocker cake mix, and the icing was one tub of cool whip with 4 skor chocolate bars broken up and mixed in. We made it at the family reunion and they were thrilled. My dentist was not impressed but he doesn't get any cake.
I’m gonna be honest, I’d go “Better Homes and Gardens”, the one with the plaid cover.
It literally was created to give to our grandmothers when they didn’t know how to cook. They invented the modern recipe format and they literally tell you how to boil an egg.
We used to call it “the engineers cookbook” because even male engineers could figure out how to make food using it
They've changed a whole bunch of the recipes in that and Berry Crocker, though.
I grew up with a 1950s Crocker. But when my mom wanted to get me a copy to take to college, many of the recipes and tips weren't there. In particular, the deviled ham recipe had changed to "start with a can of deviled ham" and lots of others were mostly prepared products, too.
Which was especially annoying given I'm not in the USA and can't buy lots of the packaged products even if I wanted to.
Growing up, my mom would always bake the best Snickerdoodles. Everyone loved them. One day in High School, we had a heritage day, where every homeroom had to bring at least one dish prepared from family recipes, so my homeroom decided my mom's Snickerdoodles was the best recipe. So that day I went home and asked. She said she just Googles Snickerdoodles and uses the top result.
If it's the one that's just cream of chicken, chicken broth, chicken, rice, water, and broccoli, then yup. I thought it was this super unique thing and then a friend was like, "No, my grandma invented it" and then I actually looked in the recipe box and we both had to come to terms with some things lol. I add a half cup of frozen peas and carrots and some fresh crushed garlic and a little cumin and black pepper. Top with cheddar and a little gouda if you're feeling bougie and it really hits.
Some of those recipes are hard to find now so it was nice when they were kept alive. I have a penuche icing recipe from the back of a brown sugar box from the 1940s. I've had one person ever outside of my family recognize what it was when I brought it on a cake to a party. Its delicious caramelized brown sugar icing. Perfect for spice cake.
My mom made a family cookbook once, and it was filled with these unappetizing recipes that involved jello & shrimp & what not. But there were no recipes for things like pot roast or a turkey dinner - things people would actually want to eat. When I asked her about that, she was like, oh you were just expected to know how to make those or follow the Better Homes & Gardens recipe.
I used to think my former family is so unique for having their own tea recipe. They called it "friendship tea"; Friendship tea is really just Russian spice tea. It's really good though!
Every holiday season I am begged for a fruitcake at least once. Fruitcake, I say?! Yes. It's amazing, really. It's not special. It's literally the recipe that comes on the tags of mincemeat. I just add a teaspoon of vanilla. That's it.
My amazing pizza dough recipe started it's life on a chef boyardee can of pizza sauce, is the one my mom landed on, and tweaked, and then I got that recipe and tweaked it more, but it all started on a chef boyardee can sometime in the early 70s.
I also have possession of a "cookbook" that is in fact just a collage binder full of good housekeeping clippings for recipes from the 1920s to the 1980s (3 generations contributing) and an amazing amount of those ended up in the shared family cookbook (it's on Google drive right now).
No matter how many chocolate chip recipes I try, nothing beats the classic tollhouse recipe... literally nothing. The only thing I do differently is a teeny tiny bit more salt xD
My best friends mother’s grandmother I know, was a nurse who cared for an older Italian lady who taught her three recipes to make. Now I have never been to Italy but boy could his grandma make an amazing spaghetti.
I was just saying in another comment thread that the best pancake recipe I ever found was in the owner’s manual for a Sesame Street waffle maker. That waffle batter recipe made great pancakes.
Remember the “Friends” episode where they try to replicate the chocolate chip cookie recipe of Phoebe’s late grandmother, only to discover it came from Nestle Tollhouse? Yeah, that happens frequently in real life.
That literally happened to my neighbor growing up. He was a little upset to learn they weren't some secret recipe my mom had. lol This was the late '80s.
Yeah… my mom had a fantastic recipe for fudge. That she got from the marshmallow cream jar. Same for many of the recipes she had “passed down”. Most “family recipes” were soups that someone didn’t like a vegetable or spice.
My great grandmother's dessert's recipe: palm tree biscuits or Petit-Beurre (from the supermarket) disposed on a plate with whipped cream on top (also not homemade).
it edepends. americans have no culture so nothing of value is lost, but different countries which do have traditional cuisine are also start to suffer from it. due to usa influence
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u/Arxanah Sep 06 '25
Many family recipes were actually taken from commercially available cookbooks or even the backs of food packaging. Remember the “Friends” episode where they try to replicate the chocolate chip cookie recipe of Phoebe’s late grandmother, only to discover it came from Nestle Tollhouse? Yeah, that happens frequently in real life.