The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

I can do them one better: my family has a meta-secret recipe. It didn't used to be secret, but it became secret through no effort or intent of our own.

For a long time, decades at this point, my mom has been known for the brownies she brings to events (and, by extension, that my sister and I bring to events). People would rave about them and demand the secret, which my mom, my sister, and I would all freely give out: it's from a box, Betty Crocker, make sure you get the "Supreme" kind and don't overbake it. That's it.

But. But! A while ago, maybe 3-4 years at this point, my mom noticed that the brownie box had changed. She had a stockpile (being known for the brownies, you see) but tried the new box before exhausting the stockpile. And it was not the same. The new recipe had different amounts of every ingredient and it just did not come out right. At all. She called the company to complain and actually managed to escalate the call far enough to get someone to admit a dark truth: the recipe on their end for the mix hadn't changed, but for various reasons to do with what they wanted to put on the "Nutrition Facts", they had changed the instructions of how to prepare them and the amount of the mix that was in each box.

My mom, not leaving this to chance, did a little bit of kitchen science and verified that what came out of the old box (from the stockpile, following the recipe) was either identical or a very close match to what came out of the new box (but following the old recipe), albeit a little inconvenient as you now needed roughly 1.25 boxes' worth of mix to make one batch of brownies. But this was but a minor hurdle for the truly devoted; and it meant that we now had, wait for it, a bona fide secret family recipe. The easiest one ever, since it still involved just making brownies from a box. (And keeping a jar of "remainder brownie mix" for use in the next batch.)

The epilogue to the story is that although the good recipe had been stable for a really long time, we were evidently not the only ones to notice a problem with the new one, because the box recipe has changed on several occasions since then—each time, as far as we can tell, without changing the blend in the underlying mix (because if we follow our Secret Recipe it still turns out fine). Really, I'm just waiting for them to throw up their hands, give up, and return to the original recipe, which would sort of deprive my family of a good story, but everybody would get better brownies so it's a win overall. :)

I remember reading an old parable about a woman who always cut off the ends of her meatloaf before serving it. At one point someone asked her why she did that, and she said that her mother had always done it that way. So she went to ask her mother, and got the same answer. The two of them went to the woman’s grandmother who said that the serving plate she cooked the meatloaf was too small, so she cut off the ends to make it fit. I have many doubts that this is true, but also I think it does illustrate a good point about how these things get started.

Most of my family’s “secret” recipes come from a big Soviet cookbook, but adapted for limited availability of products (cooking in Moscow where the book was published was always very different than cooking in Soviet Ukraine).

I actually wonder how many of the Blue Apron/HelloFresh recipes will wind up being “secret family recipes” in a few years.

My mom made the best pie crust anybody who ate it ever tasted. Her recipe came from a Crisco label.

One of the steps specifically said to slowly stir a liquid into the mix with a fork. Everybody else who attempted the recipe used a spoon and didn't get anywhere near the proper texture. So her difference was simply that others wouldn't follow the directions exactly.

Here's an opposite example: I have a friend who has amazing grit[0]. One time he figured that the cheesecake he's making would use some improvement so he experimented with a sort of an evolutionary algorithm where he would change one or two things, note the results and combine some of the changes on another try(or that's how I understood his process).

After over forty instances he has perfected the cheesecake. It's now much better than store bought in terms of taste and also usually better looking. The recipe itself isn't secret, but you'd be hard pressed to replicate his work. Apparently it's rather the skill than the procedure that makes it so great.

[0] He rewrote "The Hobbit" in Tengwar several times using a fountain pen.

For me, the most important part of the "secret family recipe" is the element of curation. There's surely hundreds of recipes for almond kringler out there, but I know that the one my mom uses at Christmas is extremely delicious. If your family has decided they really like the sugar cookie recipe in the 1985 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, perfect! The "family" part of "secret family recipe" means that it's the recipe your family likes best, and the fact it came from such-and-such a cookbook can be the secret.

When I go online and search for a recipe, I'm taking a chance that it may be awful. That's why when I find an online recipe I enjoy, I write it down in a special notebook. This also has the advantage of letting me cut out all the prefacing garbage ("my husband and my 3 beautiful children LOVE coming home on a crisp winter afternoon to a delicious bowl of this yummy soup blah blah blah") and trim down the directions to the sort of terse and informative stuff you'd find in a real cookbook. Then if I ever want to make it again, I don't have to deal with the absolute garbage of modern recipe sites popping up notifications about how butter is on sale 2 miles away, and how I can sign up for the email newsletter, etc.

On the "fudge guy" who was using the recipe from the marshmallow container, or the Toll House cookies winning 2 of the top spots: there's a lot more to good results than just the recipe. Equipment, skill, the idiosyncratic ways you don't follow the recipe or fill in where it's underspecified... Don't necessarily give in to the temptation to ascribe the phenomenon merely to irrationality or sentiment.

Plus, it must be said, the Toll House recipe is pretty darn good. Not what I use myself but sometimes the classics are classics for a reason.

There's another interesting angle in this, which is a demonstration of how important memory and emotion is in food. The restaurateur who had created Michelin Star-winning restaurants thought the standard Hellman's potato salad recipe was very good. Now, I'm not that much of a chef, and I'm not going to say it's a bad recipe, but a chef of that caliber ought to taste even a very-well prepared instance of that recipe and immediately come up with half-a-dozen ways to improve it. I could do that in my kitchen, which is really not that well stocked with that sort of thing. There's classes of improvements; use a more interesting vinegar, use a more interesting oil, use more interesting herbs, make your own mayonnaise, use different potatos, each of those representing half-a-dozen options on their own, to say nothing of the work you can do with combinations.

If you served the Hellman's recipe to a Michelin reviewer, you're not getting a star. And I'm sure that Danny Meyer would know that instantly, were he not influenced by his memories and emotions.

Also, to be clear, I am by no means being critical of him for bringing his emotion into the dish. If it's anything, it's a positive thing, in my opinion. I'm just showing this as a very clear example of how complicated reactions to food can be.

Book recommendation, if you're into this stuff... The Cooking Gene - A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, by Michael W Twitty. I'm currently halfway through, and it's fascinating. It delves deep into the roots of pre-20th century recipes and food traditions, and how African, European, and Native American cooking techniques and ingredients (along with the social structures of slavery) joined to create what became Southern cooking.

Take that Thanksgiving standby, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. That dish can be traced directly to slavery in the Caribbean! Yams were a big part of the diet (a food from Africa), and on sugar plantations, they would take cooked yams to the boiling vats and ladle boiling sugar juice directly onto the yams. This came to America via the slave trade (many American slaves came from the Caribbean rather than directly from Africa), and evolved into new dishes that preserved the flavor without easy access to giant vats of boiling sugar.

The tracing of family recipes back to their origins is amazing.

A few years back, I was backpacking through Central America and spent a few weeks in the highlands of Guatemala staying with a Mayan family while taking Spanish lessons.

Part of the deal was you ate dinner with the family, and they cooked for you.

One of the first nights I was there, she made this amazing rice and meat dish, which I assumed was some kind of traditional Mayan thing, so I asked her what it was. After a few minutes of her struggling to understand my Spanish, she hopped up, walked into the kitchen and came back...

With a soy sauce bottle — on the side was a recipe for ‘stir fry’

This brings back some great memories. My mom made fantastic home made jams. All through my childhood family members and friends would clamor for her jams she made at Christmas.

This year I finally got her to give me her recipe....it was basically the recipe on the packet of Sure Jell :-/ She did note that the important part was to by fresh fruits for the jam and not frozen so I guess there was that. Regardless it was a huge let down to know the secret was the recipe on the box of pectin that was $.50 each.

This might be biased because a "secret recipe" doesn't hold very much of its secret in the ingredients or instructions (all chocolate chip cookie recipes are quite similar) but the little tricks.

Adding a bit of something, or the timings of certain steps might be undocumented and make the secret recipe better than the famous one.

I have a recipe that I know is original (since I developed it myself) and I do my best not to keep secret. Good recipes are way better when shared.

Date chicken:

Cut two pounds of chicken breast into thin strips and marinate in red pesto [0] (one jar) for at least an hour. Bring two cans of coconut milk to boil with a pound of dried stoneless dates. Reduce heat and let simmer for half an hour, beating with a whisk to break up the dates. You should end up with a sauce that you can easily pour on the chicken later. When you start the sauce, start heating an oven to 250°C. Put the chicken in an ovenproof container and grill the slices for about 15 minutes, turning the slices over at least once. Pour the sauce on top and top off with feta cheese cubes (use dry feta, not the olive-oil drenched salad cubes). Grill till golden brown.

Serve with brown rice.

[0]: https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Filippo-Berio-Red-Pest...

My grandmother found some old family recipes from pre-independence India. I've never made any of them because they're sometimes denominated in units that no longer exist (a "viss" for example), and some of them are even measured in currency ("buy 10 rupees of x"). Maybe I could try and account for inflation and local prices 100? years ago but...I'm not optimistic.

My wife and I have a the simplest, silly "secret" recipe.

Many of her girlfriends don't work and some are really amazing cooks, but my wife who works full time doesn't feel like she has time to bake cookies or make three-bean salad or whatever. She simply knows the best places to pick those things up around town, transfers the food to plastic containers for transport, and labels it with a piece of tape that simply says something like "Paige's chocolate chip cookies".

Even though our friends by now have figured out the "secret" it still makes everyone happy. (Including me. I find cooking for others interesting, but I don't do it much anymore.)

My takeaway from this is whoever came up with the idea of including recipe ideas on/in the packaging of staples or kitchen products was a goddamn genius.

Because a common theme among many of these mistaken secret family recipe stories is that the concoctions are taken from those marketing materials, and I'd expect whatever they picked to feature would be tasty and hard to screw up to put that product in a good light.

If it's a hit with the family, they're making it frequently, and pretty soon the aunt or uncle or grandparent who makes it for the holiday gathering can do it from memory and so it's easy to assume they made it up themselves.

I bet if you were to ask that cook about their "secret" recipe to this day they'd make sure to emphasize that you have to use So-and-So brand chocolate chips for it to come out right; the very same from which they got the recipe in the first place, and without which it probably doesn't come out right (maybe intentionally)

Goddamned brilliant.

I once asked my grandmother (RIP) how she makes such amazing dumplings:

"First, you go and find a nice fat goose..."

I don't know if any of the things my grandmother has made were once from a recipe, but a few years back I spent some time with a digital camcorder recording her making them. Since she eyeballs most of it... it's really hard to imagine having properly captured this any other way.

I like the story --I don't recall where I heard it or perhaps read it. Someone recounting the story of finding out their grandma's delicious marinara sauce was not made with tomatoes from the garden but rather plain old store bought canned tomatoes --but prepared just right.

The best cooks I know all have an excellent sense of smell and rely heavily upon it to get the timing right.

Try putting that in your official recipe.

I bake a few cakes regularly. Most of the recipes can be found online, but I usually have found some tweaks that make them taste better (subjective). So I make notes of them in my little book.

I think most recipes are derivative. You have to start somewhere when you make cornbread. So why not start with a standard recipe. Then you substitute some ingredients because you're missing something at home. You find it either tastes better or worse. Then you can improve the recipe.

In the end my cornbread recipe only has 2 different ingredients that give it better texture and better aroma. It's still almost the same recipe.

Alternative hypothesis: most 'secret family recipes' are in fact original. However, the average SFR never get passed around, because it produces average-tasting stuff.

The recipe on food labels come from companies that know the product inside-out, have incentive to help you optimize the taste/effort tradeoff, and maybe have spent time and money on research. They tastes better, so they're the ones people remember.

tl;dr: people remember a disproportionately high number of plagiarized recipes because those are the good ones.

We've got a few family recipes. They're mostly not really secret, and at least in our recipe book their sources are referenced if known. But a big part of what makes the end result good is the practice we have in making them.

The real "secret" recipes tend to be for things that build on a public recipe, or are simple enough not to need one. If you asked us how to make it (and we'd be happy to share what we can), we'd only be able to give you the base recipe, or perhaps not even that, but what makes them good is the local tweaks, ingredient selection and experience in cooking that gives consistent (or at least consistently good) results.

If you want a Hollywood example, consider Po's Dad's "Secret Ingredient" soup in Kung Fu Panda.

Specially in America, with only recent History of course family recipes are adapted from books.

On the other hand my family(in Europe) holds recipes that are more than one hundred years old. Most books recipes came from taking the knowledge of grandmas on villages on places with culinary History.

Those books serve as text books over which modern cuisine has evolved.

But is a kind of food that most Americans will consider strange. They are sophisticated stews that take forever to make or have flavor that they are not used to.

When I went to China the hardest thing to get used to was all the flavors of their food, which is very rich, but most Westerners do not know it(note:Chinese restaurants have very little to do most of the time as real Chinese food is not commercial in the West).

I find that most of our family 'secret' recipes are the result of trying several recipes for a given dish, picking the best one but incorporating lessons learned from the others. Its not uncommon for a page in our family book to consists of a photocopied page from a published cookbook + notes like "fully mix in the spices 1 at a time in this order:" where the recipe just says "mix in the spices".

Additional notes like "[cousin] likes this with more cinnamon, but [uncle] will always try to add more sugar" are helpful for holidays.

My mother, and actually her mother before that, made modifications to the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe. Specifically, replacing butter with shortening and using just a bit of extra flour, while whipping the eggs a bit more in mixing. I watched an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats where he made that exact set of modifications to get puffy/cakey chocolate chip cookies, some 20 years after Grandma started baking them that way. It's always amusing to see your old school process be supported by proper food science.

Both my wife and my family have these instances regarding Betty Crocker recipes / Southern Living cookbook recipes. Although, I will say, our attempts at following the recipes are still not the same as our grandmother's. What I've noticed is our grandmothers are just better cooks; allowing them to eyeball measure, adjust temps to conditions, time things out better, and generally solve problems as they arise.

In a sense the recipe is just an idea, the cook still needs good execution.

A century ago, my family swiped a recipe by spying on another family. I suppose it could have come from a molasses bottle or even from an 1800s cookbook, but good luck finding such an origin at this point. It makes lovely gingerbread men.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Molasses_Cookies

I remember this... from nearly half a century ago.

The February 7, 1976 episode of The Jeffersons ("Louise's Cookbook") had this plot. A publisher asks Louise to write a cookbook of her ghetto recipes. (spoiler alert) It turns out her family recipes were all from a previously-published book that her grandmother (mother?) had been using.

I've been fascinated with the story of the original olivier salad for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad#History

My mother was famous for her Yams and Stuffing she made every Thanksgiving. Everyone always wanted to know. I finally asked her for the recipes and found out it was from a newspaper clipping. I laughed pretty good finding out.

If your mother's secret recipe calls for Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, Velveeta processed cheese, or Jello mix, here's a hint: It probabally isn't original.

What I want to know is where does the recipe on the side of the box come from? The robots who came up with that are the true heroes, imho.

I have an opposite story.

Once upon a time in the French countryside, there was an old pastry chef who was well known for her unique creation (of which I forgot the name), that, even 40 years later, my father still praises.

The recipe was only known by the pastry chef, even though the famous local restaurant chef (Georges Blanc, now 3 Michelin stars, at least 2 stars at the time) begged her to sell him the secret, whatever the price. She said, "my recipe will follow me into the grave". And it did.

TL;DR: come in Bresse, best food ever.

I got a secret salmon recipe from my aunt only to see it on the salmon wrapper.

My grandmother's pīrāgi were made with Poppin "Fresh" dough.

Obligatory Onion article: https://local.theonion.com/italian-grandmother-doesn-t-have-...

The recipe is the easy part. The execution and getting the right ingredients is all important.

Granma X was awesome not because of the recipe but because she practiced her whole life making it.

In other news, water is wet.