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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Primo Levi told a similar story about tracking down the source of a lacquer recipe when he was working at a paint factory. There was a point in the recipe where the instructions called for adding half an onion into the vat of lacquer. As a chemist, he was fascinated by this because he could not think of any way the chemicals in the onion, in that quantity, could affect the end product. He eventually found a retired employee living nearby who was able to explain that the onion was used to check the temperature of the lacquer. When the onion started to bubble, the mixture was hot enough to proceed to the next step. By the time Primo Levi was working at the plant in the 1940s, the plant had upgraded to modern equipment with integrated temperature gauges, but the onion remained in the recipe.

That's very clever. Reminds me of doing plumbing with copper piping and using bread to stuff the pipes before soldering them in order to not have the leftover water flowing to where you are soldering, making it impossible.

You're a genius. Absolutely. That's such a good solution! I had considered using a rag or something, but I was concerned about it getting stuck around a bend, as well as the awkwardness of rolling it up just right. If you overheat the pipe, the bread will just burn off harmlessly, and if it gets stuck, you could just turn the water on and it'll dissolve it or pop it out.

Thank you. There's an awkward pipe in my bathroom whose shut-off won't quite close enough. My wife will be so thrilled.

Oh I’m no genius. This was a trick someone told me after I spent 6 hours on a single horizontal joint. (Fortunately?) I haven’t had a chance to try it. I also don’t know what would happen if the bread headed straight for your water heater. But aside from that, I do think this is a valuable trick. Hope it works for you!

Luckily, the joint I've got to deal with, the worst case is that the bread would end up inside the faucet and might require a bit of cleaning. Seems like just running some water through it aught to dissolve the bread and let things carry on. I'll use crappy white bread to make sure it's easily dissolvable :)

Cue: the forgetting curve.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534480

(It applies not just to recent learning, but institutional and cultural memories as well.)

Both of your comments fit in to my life. My wife's family has a ton of secret family recipes that were passed down from her Grandma who was born and raised in Pennsylvania. One day we're at a used book trade and I happened to come across a cookbook published in 1971 called Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book[0] and it had all of the "secret" recipes in there.

Fast forward almost 50 years and we've had Blue Apron for over a year. We always rate the recipes and keep the recipe cards for the ones we like the best. During weeks that we need more meals, those are the ones we make. They are starting to turn in to our secret family recipes. So you definitely aren't wrong.

[0] https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9780486226767

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

We have already incorporated a few we liked into a recipe box with hand written cards....

Also our oatmeal cookie recipe comes from the back of the McCann's quick oatmeal box....don't care...it's delicious.

The version I heard, the item being cooked is cut in half because the grandmother had a smaller oven, and otherwise it would not fit.

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