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?
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.
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.
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.
oh sorry. i forget not everyone was here for the full explanation. one of my bio grampas was in a polycule and i call it the grampolycule because i had So Many Grampas
This is the important part. Modern Brussels sprouts are NOT your grandma's sprouts from the 1990s or earlier. From wikipedia :
In the 1990s, the Dutch scientist Hans van Doorn identified the chemicals that make Brussels sprouts bitter: sinigrin and progoitrin.[11] This enabled Dutch seed companies to cross-breed archived low-bitterness varieties with modern high-yield varieties
I've made delicious strawberry ice cream. One way to get the strawberry flavor in there is to steep the milk/batter with berries and let the berry juice seep out of the berry. Fun fact! If you do this, you get white ghost berries so strain them out. If you want berry chunks, add new berries afters.
This was me with soup. My mom would use all the dregs of whatever she had around to make "soup," and it was disgusting. Real soup made with the good parts of fresh ingredients is amazing, and I didn't even know until I was in my mid-20's!
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
where i live it's a part of building code that hot water has to be hot enough that legionella doesn't survive in it. depending on the place it might be different and whether building is up to code is a separate thing entirely
If you have legionella in your hot water, the issue isn't going to come from drinking it, but inhaling it when you shower. As long as you don't have a dead leg in your water system or a circuit that stagnates for long periods of time, legionella is pretty much a non-issue in the vast majority of homes, even older homes.
depends on your buildings construction, if you have steel piping then it should be fine as long as you boil it. if it's chlorinated then it shouldn't even matter too hard
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
I once read a theory that those recipes were a form of protest by women in the 1950s-60s. "I can't get a divorce, have my own bank account, or get a credit card? Then enjoy this jello, mayonnaise hotdog salad motherfucker. "
I've always figured it was a remnant from the depression that overstayed it's welcome. A lot of those horrid old recipes feel like some of the old depression recipes with too many resources, like buying up all the potions ingredients in Skyrim to make random shit. Hope you like 33 flavors of damage stamina and damage health.
I feel like the food rationing for some things during WWII wasnt enough of a large scale change from the depression era rationing to be notable. Regardless that's still about 15+ years of food scarcity to have a major cultural impact especially since much like right now the buildup to the great depression fully stetting in started as early as 1925 in some areas.
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).
Y'all's churches were weird. Growing up catholic in a German part of America we just did fish fries with beer battering and pig roasts, both with copious beer, though the kids had to stick to a single sip of wine. My wife's catholic upbringing was more Italian American and her church did meatballs in tomato sauce.
I must have lucked out, the oddest thing at my childhood churchs' potlucks were the ambrosia/watergate salad where they used ingredients that they liked instead of what the typical recipe calls for, or waldorf salads which had just a little too much mayo and not enough whipped cream.
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.
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.
One of my grandmothers had secret recipes, but when realized her time was coming to an end she taught each of her daughters different ones. So one was taught these sauces, another those desserts, and the other some special entrees. Of course the daughters got together and trained one another, but that was the point.
My mother has a couple recipes like this. Meanwhile I've taught the entire family (and my friends and some of the internet) all of my secret recipes. I only have two that I haven't taught her and I told her she can have them when she gives me hers.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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 it 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 of how to handle such doughs and how to tell whether or not the flour could actually hold on to that much water.
65% Hydration can make also make a dope loaf that's much easier to handle
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.
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 taste
That'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.
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.
All my family recipes come from my male ancestors. Sure it's also various ways of making canned food work, but it's also been an evolving process since the 1800s so it's evolved from somewhat edible to outright good. All of them are trail/camping recipes for context, lots of meat, starche, and grain.
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.
There's 4 bread layers, spread with some kind of cream cheese/mayo abomination and laid down with gherkins, ham, pistachios, and mushrooms before being pressed in the fridge overnight and "frosted" with I dunno, horseradish or CoolWhip or something. The bread makes it a sandwich I guess.
I dont necessarily agree - my family (including my mother who has run a few restaurants into the ground) didnt have any recipes worth passing down - unless you count dumping a jar of ragu in a pot with some spaghetti.
By the time I was 20 I could match or improve the flavour of any dish from childhood (about the only good thing to come out of going to a culinary scam college), and I ended up not cooking... Basically any of it. I still pop open a can of smoked oysters on cheese and cracker nights, but thats more for remembering my grandma than anything else.
I blame the fact that everyone in my family smoked like a chimney and had no tastebuds left.
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.
Is it weird that I can't recall my grandmother ever cooking for me? She may have at some point, but there was never any special reverence for her cooking the way I hear a lot of families have. As far as food goes, my strongest memories are about how she'd keep a cup of jelly beans in her car. I was always excited to ride with her because of it, haha.
The big deal cook in my family is my dad, who would have everybody lining up for his chili when he'd cook food for games and fundraisers. He became known for it. When a home game was coming up, football players would ask my marching band brothers if our dad would be cooking for it.
It's interesting too, because despite being born in a foreign country, and nearly my entire extended family being of the same culture, he doesn't cook in that style. His recipes are entirely his own. The key difference is that he uses a lot of sorrel, which is rare in the US but very common in the country he's from. We grew it in our backyard garden, and he gifted me a potted plant of it when I moved out.
I used to get annoyed when he'd invite himself to join me whenever I cooked... but I miss it now.
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people. Just because they did this to live most definitely does not mean you are to live this way. Britons and "headcheese".
Bill Bryson in his biography of growing up in Iowa tells how his grandmother in rural Iowa used to serve these dishes. He concedes that they all were regular dishes with copious amounts of the food the advertisers sold.
He also called Jello the state fruit of Iowa
The 70s were interesting times.. My mom made so many odd dishes from good housekeeping magazine. The jello salads are probably more normal. Have you ever had 'bbq' chicken that was cooked in a pot of coke and ketchup? You just cook it until the liquid reduces away.
My mom was a great cook by the way. She made those dishes primarily for budgetary reasons.
See the thing is you have to remember that a lot of people's grandparents now are not great depression or a children. They were raised by those from the Great depression but they developed their own horrible nasty cooking habits in the '50s and '60s.
Yeah, at this point "grandma's recipes" would be mostly mid-century ones based around boxed or canned hyper processed convenience foods. "Put your French's® french-fried onions on top of your green bean casserole made with Campbell's™ cream of mushroom soup" and that sort of shit.
Also, probably half the recipes have their ingredient ratios thrown off by shrinkflation, since they were designed to use whole packages (for even more 'convenience') instead of giving proper measurements. And even if you did convert them to real units, nobody wants a recipe that needs 1.25 tubs of Johnson & Mills Bean Lard Mulch because a tub is now only 80% the size of what it used to be anyway!
My grandparents ate boiled potatoes with boiled vegetables and watery meat. When I lived at my parents we often at the same. Thank god that we've adapted the cuisine from countries that actually discovered that food can have taste
You need to understand that back in those days, you simply couldn't buy but maybe a third of what you take for granted in your favorite grocery store today. You can't cook with what you can't get.
By the end of September, there were few fresh greens or vegetables beyond root crops. If you wanted a tomato, you needed to open a can or jar. And smoked paprika? Nobody had ever heard of it, let alone tasted it.
Don't forget the middle ground where they cross. War time ration crime against God that your parents swear is comfort food but is actually why they are missing brain cells.
Boiled "skinned" hotdog in cabbage soup.... Was my grandmother's. Funfact its broth was made of bullion cubes and hot dog skins.... Its very beefy...
My Irish American grandma on my dad's side had two recipes. 'Roast Butt ', some pale greasy meat that was boiled until it was falling apart, yet still resisted cutting and chewing once it cursed your plate: the left overs of this were tossed into a pot with a can of La Choy 'Oriental Style Vegetables' and a bottle of some sweet sauce and dubbed 'Chop Suey', which was probably from a recipe she got out of an ad in the back of a TV guide in the 60s.
The woman could boil a mean potato, though.
My Oklahoma dust bowl era meemaw never really cooked anything that didn't come from a can, but she baked bread and 'English Muffins' from scratch that held up well when frozen.
The bread was really dry and tasteless unless you really slathered on condiments. The 'muffins' were flattened little lumps of dough that were as dense as a dying star, not a single nook or cranny in sight, with a chewy raw consistency not unlike chewing gum.
I actually liked those a lot, and was disappointed later in life when I had store bought English Muffins, which were more like a mutant crumpet than anything else.
My mom and sister have the recipes, but neither have attempted making them. I'm afraid to read them because they'll probably just say:
One box Jiffy baking mix, water, salt. Bake until done.
A casserole is one of those American concoctions where you essentially mush a bunch of stuff, cover it in some form of dairy byproduct that can legally be called cheese for some reason, and stick it in the oven, right?
Mostly it's a vegetable (tomato sauce), starch (noodles), and meat. Dairy is not required but I've seen plenty of hot dishes containing celery, potato chips, apples, whatever.
Pretty much. My grandmother made something called tater tot casserole: a mix of ground beef, frozen tater tots, canned beans, and mystery spices that went stale sometime in the last ice age. This was covered with about half a kilo of cheese and baked until a point she couldn't quite articulate but "just knew".
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.
I believe it used to be called "aspic" if you're looking for colloquially similar fads. Jello is an American brand name, so obviously that's going to appear mostly in American fads.
I think we only have Jellied Eels in that category, and nobody eats that because it's vile.
Usually we just use jelly for pudding foods. We used to have lime jelly with tinned orange segments in it, called "fishes in the pond".
I've absolutely no idea if that is a UK thing, or a my family thing. Google seems to deny all knowledge of it, but that could just be how Google is these days.
Yea, and TBF, a lot of these recipes are gonna be from the 50s and 60s, and most are probably dead and buried where they should be. They were mostly all vile abominations of gelatin and mayonnaise.
Gelatin was used plenty in UK. Iv watched plenty of British cooking shows that focused on the 40s-80s to know that for a fact. But it just got REAL fucking big here cause of name brand jello.
yeah, depression / ration era cooking for anyone not of reasonable wealth was pretty bad, and they stuff they dreamed up on the far side where they were no longer rationed.
My grandmother took a pack of 15 bean soup, added butter beans and lima beans, the broth was basically butter with a touch of milk/cream and a touch of salt. Then a dish of Mrs Weiss kluski noodles also served in butter occasionally with a little chicken. My father always raved about it.
Funny part, she always complained about how long it took her to make the noodles, told us all they were hand made. After going up there for over a decade, one day she left the bag in the sink. That dinner was a HOOT
Here's another thing, they used to cook the shit out of food. Not burnt? Can't serve it. And don't get me started on ketchup. On your steak? Seriously?
Both my mother, and my mother in law will not eat a steak unless it is well done. Even when it is cooked well done, they have been known to microwave it after just to be sure.
My mother burnt cookies. Every.damn.time. I thought she was just bad at it until a year ago my dad burnt his toast. I asked if he liked it that way. Yup. She burnt things because he liked it that way.
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.
Yeah, 40 years ago was a food desert compared to today just because of the dearth of information. We got our area's first Greek restaurant 35 years ago. Granted we also have so much more available now (the citrus selection at the SEA market puts whole foods to shame. They have like 5 kinds of kumquats. local whole foods doesn't even have loquats) so sometimes it's hard to remember how limited our diets were even two decades ago.
Like, I just started making my own gyro. Grinding my own beef/pork mix (lamb is expensive and my lamb guy got a new job instead of working at the dispo so I need a new lamb guy) and getting some herbs in there. I never thought I could do that. Thank you internet.
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.
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.
Meanwhile my sister and I have frantically searched for our großoma's recipes and are trying to figure them out. Nobody else in the family had recipes worth passing down other than my mom's specific vibe for chex mix, which I maintain. Any niblings will get a copy of my recipes upon request.
And yeah my grandma that's better at cooking doesn't use salt and hasn't cooked a meal my wife and I both can eat since we got together.
My grandma lived through the depression, her cooking was god awful, I had to teach my mom how to cook and season food. She didn’t know why people used paprika.
Microwaves with the wire rack instead of the glass plate end up giving 'em grill marks as if they were lightly BBQd if you put them directly on the wire rack. But grilling is still the better option when you have time.
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!
What is it with americans putting everything in jello? That's just gross. And then they make jokes about fries with vinegar (which is just ketchup without tomato (edit: and sugar)).
It was a mid 20th century fad. Aspic had been very expensive and time consuming for a long time and so was considered a high status food.
Then in the post WW2 era we had immense prosperity the likes of which we hadn't seen before, not just because we were the largest industrialized nation to not be bombed to rubble and had ramped up our industrial capacity, but also because after the great depression and world wars, this was the first time that our average citizen got to experience the full boon of the second industrial revolution. Even better, the new deal (a massive government program meant to end the great depression, increase food supply, and generally just improve the quality of life) as well as the effects of food safety and purity laws and veterans benefits were all in full force.
People who had had a very difficult life suddenly owned a house, had domestic labor saving machines, time and energy to entertain, and modern mass produced industrial foods of quality we now would consider fit for human consumption. Many of these people didn't know how to cook with after 15 years of rationing. But not to worry! Modern advertising and marketing also came into being in this time. This is the era of the long form ad, and with it the idea that you could just print recipes on the side of ingredients and people would just try them.
So jello… in the early 20th century gelatin went from being something you have to spend a long time rendering out of bones yourself, using imprecise equipment like a wood fired stove, to an industrial food product you can buy for a few cents. All this came together for ad campaigns of weird savory and sweet and savory-sweet jello dishes, usually using other industrial foodstuffs from the same company like hot dogs, mayonnaise, and canned fruit and vegetables. And people who didn't know how to cook with these new foods and tools said sure and tried some of them, typically to serve at parties.
This is the equivalent of if suddenly you could buy lab grown lobster and sirloin for a buck or two a pound, and for a while everyone's poor as shit so they're stretching their beans as far as the can, but suddenly everyone is able to buy a house and have a few kids with plenty of money left over from 1 person working 20 hours a week. The people selling lobster are going to have to remind you that this is high quality food for cheap, and they have to teach you how to use it. It starts simple, roasted tails with butter, bisque, the classics. Then they start moving into weirder stuff like lobster burgers, before eventually getting into weird shit like lobster chocolate cake. And the weirdest thing here is it's actually more like if the lobster chocolate cake came pretty early and completely dominated the cultural mindset to the point where people think that the weird savory stuff was gross because lobster is a desert food that's sometimes used in traditional savory dishes.
Oh and the reason you keep seeing Americans talk about it is because we think it sounds gross as hell
Its not an American thing, it's a Mormon thing. It had a very brief period of popularity outside of those freaks but yeah, I'd wager most Americans have never eaten Jell-O with something other than fruit in it.
I'd guess there's way more ketchup haters than people who even know the deliciousness of make vinegar, too. And "ketchup" here isn't just ketchup+vinegar, it's LOADED with sugar. I'm one of the ketchup haters.
Jello was a big thing in the 1960s and 70s. But now it's pretty much a regional thing. Oh sure you see it occasionally, but it's far from the dessert staple it once was in the US.
Your Great Grandmother was all in on it, but your Grandmother not as much. And the odds are good that your mother would need to watch a YouTube video or something to make anything even close.
My 2 Grandmothers were wildly different in their cooking skills. And they both grew up thought the Depression years. So you cooked with what you had, because that's all that you had.
One could make the most incredible sausages-- oatmeal sausages, blood sausages, various summer sausages and canned beef at home and from scratch without any recipe. But beyond that, it took a very good set of teeth to eat at her table. And forget about cookies or any kind of baked goods. Those she bought.
My other Grandmother was a classic little old Norwegian Lady. A 5-Star Michelin Chef should be that good. She made everything from scratch. Often on an old coal-fired cast iron cook stove and oven despite having a perfectly good electric stove. And the breads and pastries and cookies she would make! In a rural farm neighborhood filled with great cooks, she was considered the best baker of them all. And so many recipes. Church cookbooks galore. Carefully handwritten 3x5 cards filled a dozen metal boxes. Clipped newspaper and magazine recipes, each stored in photo books. And I never ever once saw her use any of them. Everything was in her head.
It was truly a travesty that my own Mother never learned how to cook or even cared about cooking. But, she could sew. And made most of our clothes growing up.
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?
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.
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!
Even boiled vegetables taste good if you don't go stupid mode about it.
Boggles my mind oven roasted asparagus and broccoli were not a thing as a child.
My gourmand grampolycule even did grilled lemon almond mzithra broccoli once in the 90s. They spoiled us.
Well that sounds like a good... someone. Gourmet grandpa?
oh sorry. i forget not everyone was here for the full explanation. one of my bio grampas was in a polycule and i call it the grampolycule because i had So Many Grampas
Oh, lol, I was wondering how autocorrect might create that. So what's Gourmand?
*Someone who likes food.
a gourmand is a fat gourmet. that is my definition and it is the best definition
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.
This is the important part. Modern Brussels sprouts are NOT your grandma's sprouts from the 1990s or earlier. From wikipedia :
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2241/
Goddamn. They really do have a comic for everything.
I really like boiled Brussel spouts from the 70s.
I've made delicious strawberry ice cream. One way to get the strawberry flavor in there is to steep the milk/batter with berries and let the berry juice seep out of the berry. Fun fact! If you do this, you get white ghost berries so strain them out. If you want berry chunks, add new berries afters.
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).
This was me with soup. My mom would use all the dregs of whatever she had around to make "soup," and it was disgusting. Real soup made with the good parts of fresh ingredients is amazing, and I didn't even know until I was in my mid-20's!
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.
Sounds like granny was a full blown dumbass.
Or had early onset Alzheimer's. Or both.
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
I've always heard not to drink hot tap water or cook with it because of the risk of nasty things leaching from the pipes. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/is-it-actually-bad-to-drink-warm-water-from-the-tap/102812252
Legionella specifically. If you're going to drink hot from the tap, go all the way to boiling first
legionella dies after 2min at 60C tho
do i look like i'm made of thermometers?
don't look in my barbecue drawer look at the thing in front of you that is meat
where i live it's a part of building code that hot water has to be hot enough that legionella doesn't survive in it. depending on the place it might be different and whether building is up to code is a separate thing entirely
If you have legionella in your hot water, the issue isn't going to come from drinking it, but inhaling it when you shower. As long as you don't have a dead leg in your water system or a circuit that stagnates for long periods of time, legionella is pretty much a non-issue in the vast majority of homes, even older homes.
depends on your buildings construction, if you have steel piping then it should be fine as long as you boil it. if it's chlorinated then it shouldn't even matter too hard
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 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.
Nah, that's the liver.
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.
I would have eaten those for sure.
Dude! We made those exact pizzas as kids after temple. They were quite good.
Ahem.
Cheesus Crust.
That is all.
Mayonnaise PLUS jello, with hotdogs. Perfect.
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?
I once read a theory that those recipes were a form of protest by women in the 1950s-60s. "I can't get a divorce, have my own bank account, or get a credit card? Then enjoy this jello, mayonnaise hotdog salad motherfucker. "
How to quiet quit life: hotdog jello.
I've always figured it was a remnant from the depression that overstayed it's welcome. A lot of those horrid old recipes feel like some of the old depression recipes with too many resources, like buying up all the potions ingredients in Skyrim to make random shit. Hope you like 33 flavors of damage stamina and damage health.
WWII for the canned food. That's why them and Boomers hold onto a bunch of food items that only happened for 15-20 years.
I feel like the food rationing for some things during WWII wasnt enough of a large scale change from the depression era rationing to be notable. Regardless that's still about 15+ years of food scarcity to have a major cultural impact especially since much like right now the buildup to the great depression fully stetting in started as early as 1925 in some areas.
I mean that GIs got adapted to liking canned food and took that home.
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.
Ha. I know where you went to church.
Probably. Because we were there together. I think. Those were nasty jellos
Y'all's churches were weird. Growing up catholic in a German part of America we just did fish fries with beer battering and pig roasts, both with copious beer, though the kids had to stick to a single sip of wine. My wife's catholic upbringing was more Italian American and her church did meatballs in tomato sauce.
I must have lucked out, the oddest thing at my childhood churchs' potlucks were the ambrosia/watergate salad where they used ingredients that they liked instead of what the typical recipe calls for, or waldorf salads which had just a little too much mayo and not enough whipped cream.
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.
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!
One of my grandmothers had secret recipes, but when realized her time was coming to an end she taught each of her daughters different ones. So one was taught these sauces, another those desserts, and the other some special entrees. Of course the daughters got together and trained one another, but that was the point.
It’s very likely:( I know some people who are holding out on their kids for that reason.
My mother has a couple recipes like this. Meanwhile I've taught the entire family (and my friends and some of the internet) all of my secret recipes. I only have two that I haven't taught her and I told her she can have them when she gives me hers.
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!
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
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.
I did this too! I had her write down the ingredients of my favorite Mac and cheese she made, and I still have it.
I liked the grated from the bag as a kid because she made me grate my own cheese. Ha!
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).
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).
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 it 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 of how to handle such doughs and how to tell whether or not the flour could actually hold on to that much water. 65% Hydration can make also make a dope loaf that's much easier to handle
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.
Feeling it out is my favorite part about cooking.
I just never ever write down what I do, so I can never reproduce it lol
The secret ingredient was dust, dander, and flop sweat.
Source: my grandmother's kitchen. No disrespect granny, but your kitchen hygiene was awful.
It's the *snrk* that runs down her nose
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 taste
That'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
I didn't see any crow eggs in the recipe.
Your god, maybe.
The god of chaos demands at oyster milk sacrifice!
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.
All my family recipes come from my male ancestors. Sure it's also various ways of making canned food work, but it's also been an evolving process since the 1800s so it's evolved from somewhat edible to outright good. All of them are trail/camping recipes for context, lots of meat, starche, and grain.
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.
I don't know what the fuck that monstrosity is, but what I do know is that it is neither a snack nor a sandwich!
There's 4 bread layers, spread with some kind of cream cheese/mayo abomination and laid down with gherkins, ham, pistachios, and mushrooms before being pressed in the fridge overnight and "frosted" with I dunno, horseradish or CoolWhip or something. The bread makes it a sandwich I guess.
No.
I don't care what's in it or what other fevered rationalizations someone might try to make; just No.
The mushrooms worry me the most. There's sizeable gaps between them, which seem to have been filled up entirely with whatever the white stuff is...
Hey maybe it's marshmallow fluff!
has anyone ever tried this?
Family recipes are great though. Not women's job, but they are great and should be preserved. Unless they involve gelatin.
I dont necessarily agree - my family (including my mother who has run a few restaurants
into the ground) didnt have any recipes worth passing down - unless you count dumping a jar of ragu in a pot with some spaghetti.By the time I was 20 I could match or improve the flavour of any dish from childhood (about the only good thing to come out of going to a culinary
scamcollege), and I ended up not cooking... Basically any of it. I still pop open a can of smoked oysters on cheese and cracker nights, but thats more for remembering my grandma than anything else.I blame the fact that everyone in my family smoked like a chimney and had no tastebuds left.
Hush up and eat your hooves
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...
Is it weird that I can't recall my grandmother ever cooking for me? She may have at some point, but there was never any special reverence for her cooking the way I hear a lot of families have. As far as food goes, my strongest memories are about how she'd keep a cup of jelly beans in her car. I was always excited to ride with her because of it, haha.
The big deal cook in my family is my dad, who would have everybody lining up for his chili when he'd cook food for games and fundraisers. He became known for it. When a home game was coming up, football players would ask my marching band brothers if our dad would be cooking for it.
It's interesting too, because despite being born in a foreign country, and nearly my entire extended family being of the same culture, he doesn't cook in that style. His recipes are entirely his own. The key difference is that he uses a lot of sorrel, which is rare in the US but very common in the country he's from. We grew it in our backyard garden, and he gifted me a potted plant of it when I moved out.
I used to get annoyed when he'd invite himself to join me whenever I cooked... but I miss it now.
🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people. Just because they did this to live most definitely does not mean you are to live this way. Britons and "headcheese".
Some family recipes are heirlooms. Others are evidence.
Case in point:
Never has there ever been a more load-bearing-linchpin use of the word "salad".
to be fair, it's a molded salad, much more structurally sound that way.
I'm still convinced that those were used as gag gifts at the time and that nobody actually prepared those ridiculous things, even in the US.
Bill Bryson in his biography of growing up in Iowa tells how his grandmother in rural Iowa used to serve these dishes. He concedes that they all were regular dishes with copious amounts of the food the advertisers sold. He also called Jello the state fruit of Iowa
The power of US marketing never ceases to amaze me (not in a good way, mind).
I've heard some gnarly things about Midwestern "cuisine"
If only that were true.
The 70s were interesting times.. My mom made so many odd dishes from good housekeeping magazine. The jello salads are probably more normal. Have you ever had 'bbq' chicken that was cooked in a pot of coke and ketchup? You just cook it until the liquid reduces away.
My mom was a great cook by the way. She made those dishes primarily for budgetary reasons.
That Christmas Tree Salad looks like a glob of jizz that is standing up and getting ready to gain sentience.
Looks delish
Extra tasty ham loaf... as opposed to a regularly tasty ham loaf? Huh.
The corn pie is structurally weird, but the ingredients list looks pretty sane. It's basically just meatloaf in an unusual shape.
That's the one that I'm actually interested to maybe try someday.
Great depression, to rationing to factory farm byproducts and processed food.
See the thing is you have to remember that a lot of people's grandparents now are not great depression or a children. They were raised by those from the Great depression but they developed their own horrible nasty cooking habits in the '50s and '60s.
Yeah, at this point "grandma's recipes" would be mostly mid-century ones based around boxed or canned hyper processed convenience foods. "Put your French's® french-fried onions on top of your green bean casserole made with Campbell's™ cream of mushroom soup" and that sort of shit.
Also, probably half the recipes have their ingredient ratios thrown off by shrinkflation, since they were designed to use whole packages (for even more 'convenience') instead of giving proper measurements. And even if you did convert them to real units, nobody wants a recipe that needs 1.25 tubs of Johnson & Mills Bean Lard Mulch because a tub is now only 80% the size of what it used to be anyway!
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/grandmas-recipes-dont-turn-anymore-091602464.html
My grandparents ate boiled potatoes with boiled vegetables and watery meat. When I lived at my parents we often at the same. Thank god that we've adapted the cuisine from countries that actually discovered that food can have taste
You need to understand that back in those days, you simply couldn't buy but maybe a third of what you take for granted in your favorite grocery store today. You can't cook with what you can't get.
By the end of September, there were few fresh greens or vegetables beyond root crops. If you wanted a tomato, you needed to open a can or jar. And smoked paprika? Nobody had ever heard of it, let alone tasted it.
That's the one really positive thing about the internet. One doesn't need a grandma who could cook to have access to good recipes any more.
Down with big grandma
Grandma’s cookbook had two categories: comfort food and culinary crimes.
i have a 'gold cookbook' inherited from my grandma that covers pretty much anything that was available in the 50s
Don't forget the middle ground where they cross. War time ration crime against God that your parents swear is comfort food but is actually why they are missing brain cells.
Boiled "skinned" hotdog in cabbage soup.... Was my grandmother's. Funfact its broth was made of bullion cubes and hot dog skins.... Its very beefy...
If your lucky you get navy beans added.
My Irish American grandma on my dad's side had two recipes. 'Roast Butt ', some pale greasy meat that was boiled until it was falling apart, yet still resisted cutting and chewing once it cursed your plate: the left overs of this were tossed into a pot with a can of La Choy 'Oriental Style Vegetables' and a bottle of some sweet sauce and dubbed 'Chop Suey', which was probably from a recipe she got out of an ad in the back of a TV guide in the 60s.
The woman could boil a mean potato, though.
My Oklahoma dust bowl era meemaw never really cooked anything that didn't come from a can, but she baked bread and 'English Muffins' from scratch that held up well when frozen.
The bread was really dry and tasteless unless you really slathered on condiments. The 'muffins' were flattened little lumps of dough that were as dense as a dying star, not a single nook or cranny in sight, with a chewy raw consistency not unlike chewing gum.
I actually liked those a lot, and was disappointed later in life when I had store bought English Muffins, which were more like a mutant crumpet than anything else.
My mom and sister have the recipes, but neither have attempted making them. I'm afraid to read them because they'll probably just say:
One box Jiffy baking mix, water, salt. Bake until done.
You have a way with words. I'm dying at "as dense as a dying star" lmao
The very bad neighborhood of Flavortown.
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.
A casserole is one of those American concoctions where you essentially mush a bunch of stuff, cover it in some form of dairy byproduct that can legally be called cheese for some reason, and stick it in the oven, right?
Mostly it's a vegetable (tomato sauce), starch (noodles), and meat. Dairy is not required but I've seen plenty of hot dishes containing celery, potato chips, apples, whatever.
Pretty much. My grandmother made something called tater tot casserole: a mix of ground beef, frozen tater tots, canned beans, and mystery spices that went stale sometime in the last ice age. This was covered with about half a kilo of cheese and baked until a point she couldn't quite articulate but "just knew".
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.
Both my grandmothers were great cooks. I guess I had a lucky childhood in that regards.
The Jello thing must be American.
In the UK we made everything with potatoes and Spam.
I believe it used to be called "aspic" if you're looking for colloquially similar fads. Jello is an American brand name, so obviously that's going to appear mostly in American fads.
In Norway peas, carrot bits and shrimp in aspic is called "Cabaret". It is not bad, but not so great you choose it over almost anything else
I think we only have Jellied Eels in that category, and nobody eats that because it's vile.
Usually we just use jelly for pudding foods. We used to have lime jelly with tinned orange segments in it, called "fishes in the pond".
I've absolutely no idea if that is a UK thing, or a my family thing. Google seems to deny all knowledge of it, but that could just be how Google is these days.
Yea, and TBF, a lot of these recipes are gonna be from the 50s and 60s, and most are probably dead and buried where they should be. They were mostly all vile abominations of gelatin and mayonnaise.
Gelatin was used plenty in UK. Iv watched plenty of British cooking shows that focused on the 40s-80s to know that for a fact. But it just got REAL fucking big here cause of name brand jello.
So it's just truely absurd here state side.
Spam is fucking delicious though... Just be sure to get the "less sodium" version
Mormons.
I grew up on shredded carrots in raspberry jello. Both the texture and the taste left a lot to be desired lol
mormons got it covered lol. there's a fair bit of survivorship bias here
yeah, depression / ration era cooking for anyone not of reasonable wealth was pretty bad, and they stuff they dreamed up on the far side where they were no longer rationed.
My grandmother took a pack of 15 bean soup, added butter beans and lima beans, the broth was basically butter with a touch of milk/cream and a touch of salt. Then a dish of Mrs Weiss kluski noodles also served in butter occasionally with a little chicken. My father always raved about it.
Funny part, she always complained about how long it took her to make the noodles, told us all they were hand made. After going up there for over a decade, one day she left the bag in the sink. That dinner was a HOOT
A lot of people really don't want to admit that their family recipes are trash.
Here's another thing, they used to cook the shit out of food. Not burnt? Can't serve it. And don't get me started on ketchup. On your steak? Seriously?
Both my mother, and my mother in law will not eat a steak unless it is well done. Even when it is cooked well done, they have been known to microwave it after just to be sure.
My mother burnt cookies. Every.damn.time. I thought she was just bad at it until a year ago my dad burnt his toast. I asked if he liked it that way. Yup. She burnt things because he liked it that way.
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.
Yeah, 40 years ago was a food desert compared to today just because of the dearth of information. We got our area's first Greek restaurant 35 years ago. Granted we also have so much more available now (the citrus selection at the SEA market puts whole foods to shame. They have like 5 kinds of kumquats. local whole foods doesn't even have loquats) so sometimes it's hard to remember how limited our diets were even two decades ago.
Like, I just started making my own gyro. Grinding my own beef/pork mix (lamb is expensive and my lamb guy got a new job instead of working at the dispo so I need a new lamb guy) and getting some herbs in there. I never thought I could do that. Thank you internet.
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.
Using ground meat as a seasoning in your pasta sauce?
Utah, is it?
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.
And here I am in Spain, laughing, and crying, and barfing a little in my mouth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwbnzEJSbRg
Holodetz
did you know you can buy those jelly soaked weenies? and dont let them convince you they were made in vienna
Meanwhile my sister and I have frantically searched for our großoma's recipes and are trying to figure them out. Nobody else in the family had recipes worth passing down other than my mom's specific vibe for chex mix, which I maintain. Any niblings will get a copy of my recipes upon request.
And yeah my grandma that's better at cooking doesn't use salt and hasn't cooked a meal my wife and I both can eat since we got together.
My grandma lived through the depression, her cooking was god awful, I had to teach my mom how to cook and season food. She didn’t know why people used paprika.
I will never understand why some people prefer to boil hotdogs instead of just microwaving them. They taste better and it's way faster.
Depends on the hotdog. Beef franks in natural casing? Boil. Chicken/pork dogs? Do whatever you want with them, it ain't gonna save them.
Don't you denegrate my Oscar Meyer! He died for our hot dog sins!
I will toss them on some foil in the toaster oven rather than boil them.
Pan fry or outdoor grill. I want that skin blistered and browned.
Microwaves with the wire rack instead of the glass plate end up giving 'em grill marks as if they were lightly BBQd if you put them directly on the wire rack. But grilling is still the better option when you have time.
I air fry my hot dogs now after nearly two decades of boiling them, and a few years of baking them.
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!
Not gonna lie, I'd eat the shrimp jello.
What is it with americans putting everything in jello? That's just gross. And then they make jokes about fries with vinegar (which is just ketchup without tomato (edit: and sugar)).
It was a mid 20th century fad. Aspic had been very expensive and time consuming for a long time and so was considered a high status food.
Then in the post WW2 era we had immense prosperity the likes of which we hadn't seen before, not just because we were the largest industrialized nation to not be bombed to rubble and had ramped up our industrial capacity, but also because after the great depression and world wars, this was the first time that our average citizen got to experience the full boon of the second industrial revolution. Even better, the new deal (a massive government program meant to end the great depression, increase food supply, and generally just improve the quality of life) as well as the effects of food safety and purity laws and veterans benefits were all in full force.
People who had had a very difficult life suddenly owned a house, had domestic labor saving machines, time and energy to entertain, and modern mass produced industrial foods of quality we now would consider fit for human consumption. Many of these people didn't know how to cook with after 15 years of rationing. But not to worry! Modern advertising and marketing also came into being in this time. This is the era of the long form ad, and with it the idea that you could just print recipes on the side of ingredients and people would just try them.
So jello… in the early 20th century gelatin went from being something you have to spend a long time rendering out of bones yourself, using imprecise equipment like a wood fired stove, to an industrial food product you can buy for a few cents. All this came together for ad campaigns of weird savory and sweet and savory-sweet jello dishes, usually using other industrial foodstuffs from the same company like hot dogs, mayonnaise, and canned fruit and vegetables. And people who didn't know how to cook with these new foods and tools said sure and tried some of them, typically to serve at parties.
This is the equivalent of if suddenly you could buy lab grown lobster and sirloin for a buck or two a pound, and for a while everyone's poor as shit so they're stretching their beans as far as the can, but suddenly everyone is able to buy a house and have a few kids with plenty of money left over from 1 person working 20 hours a week. The people selling lobster are going to have to remind you that this is high quality food for cheap, and they have to teach you how to use it. It starts simple, roasted tails with butter, bisque, the classics. Then they start moving into weirder stuff like lobster burgers, before eventually getting into weird shit like lobster chocolate cake. And the weirdest thing here is it's actually more like if the lobster chocolate cake came pretty early and completely dominated the cultural mindset to the point where people think that the weird savory stuff was gross because lobster is a desert food that's sometimes used in traditional savory dishes.
Oh and the reason you keep seeing Americans talk about it is because we think it sounds gross as hell
This, exactly. It was a fad because it was almost unobtainable prior to that era.
We were here with our InstaPot chicken wings. Now it's air fryers and 'seed oil free' french fries.
The answer i didn't deserve. Thanks!
Its not an American thing, it's a Mormon thing. It had a very brief period of popularity outside of those freaks but yeah, I'd wager most Americans have never eaten Jell-O with something other than fruit in it.
I'd guess there's way more ketchup haters than people who even know the deliciousness of make vinegar, too. And "ketchup" here isn't just ketchup+vinegar, it's LOADED with sugar. I'm one of the ketchup haters.
On the continent, they called it aspic. It used to be a thing: https://juliachildfans.com/julia-child-aspic-recipe/
Maybe it still is? (vegan alternative): https://www.realfoods.co.uk/recipe/egg-and-green-pea-vegetarian-aspic-agar-agar-jelly
How to starter bit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/food/2010/08/how-do-i-make-lovely-jellies.shtml
Jello was a big thing in the 1960s and 70s. But now it's pretty much a regional thing. Oh sure you see it occasionally, but it's far from the dessert staple it once was in the US.
Your Great Grandmother was all in on it, but your Grandmother not as much. And the odds are good that your mother would need to watch a YouTube video or something to make anything even close.
My 2 Grandmothers were wildly different in their cooking skills. And they both grew up thought the Depression years. So you cooked with what you had, because that's all that you had.
One could make the most incredible sausages-- oatmeal sausages, blood sausages, various summer sausages and canned beef at home and from scratch without any recipe. But beyond that, it took a very good set of teeth to eat at her table. And forget about cookies or any kind of baked goods. Those she bought.
My other Grandmother was a classic little old Norwegian Lady. A 5-Star Michelin Chef should be that good. She made everything from scratch. Often on an old coal-fired cast iron cook stove and oven despite having a perfectly good electric stove. And the breads and pastries and cookies she would make! In a rural farm neighborhood filled with great cooks, she was considered the best baker of them all. And so many recipes. Church cookbooks galore. Carefully handwritten 3x5 cards filled a dozen metal boxes. Clipped newspaper and magazine recipes, each stored in photo books. And I never ever once saw her use any of them. Everything was in her head.
It was truly a travesty that my own Mother never learned how to cook or even cared about cooking. But, she could sew. And made most of our clothes growing up.
Great grandmothers. Thanks!
Any idea who is being quoted in the tweet?
Conservatives who are triggered by the idea of women wanting to be anything other than housewives
the inciting quote - why bother with interacting with that boomer manosphere behavior
https://youtu.be/XAdRX76_Udo