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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

Recipes on the internet are the worst mess, thousands of recipes for yellow cake that differ in ingredients and quantities for no discernable reason, someone's recipe for spanish rice made with taco bell sauce packets, macaroni and cheese with more mayonnaise then macaroni and cheese combined, and now the bloggers where you have to read through six pages of how the author used to make the recipe with their departed grandmother before getting to anything of substance.

Instead I bought a used 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook from a used book store, beats Google every time.

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The problem with old cookbooks is that ingredients and tastes change dramatically over the years.

Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork.

Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity.

Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.

Joy of cooking has been updated many times since 1950.

The editions from 30 years ago already had changes and guidance related to the changes in the way pork is raised/bred/produced. All those Aspic & gross molded meat recipes were banished from mainstream cookbooks 40+ years ago too.

The internet recipes certainly don't take this kind of thing into account. Lots of them are bad versions of recipes that were plagiarized from famous cookbooks, which changes that don't make sense or issues that you will discover if you follow the recipe.

Many of these recipe blogs are not interested in quality of the recipe, just quality of the SEO and getting their ad dollars. They are also certainly not interested in keeping the recipe healthy since they are probably not actually making the food from the recipe and eating it.

You can do far better with an actual cookbook. I think the actual recipes on the internet are probably all just content farm nonsense. ChatGPT is probably really useful for writing the nonsense stuff at the top of the blog that helps with SEO!

No one mentioned Joy of Cooking here, and you glossed over my recommendation to get a cookbook from recent decades (not the 50s!)... like an updated version of The Joy of Cooking.

Joy of cooking was mentioned multiple times here. Are you alright? What is the problem? You are being really pushy about a topic you seem to have marginal knowledge of.

Joy of Cooking was mentioned zero times in the comment I made originally and was replied to here above. I have no idea why the reply to me above mentioned it.

Betty Crocker cookbook is what this whole comment thread was about. I trust you realize there is a very big difference between Joy of Cooking, a book written by the late Julia Childs, and The Betty Crocker Cookbook, a book written by a fictitious person invented by a giant corporation to market and sell their processed food. Please read and comprehend before you reply.

Again, you are wrong.

Julia Child had nothing to do with writing the Joy of Cooking.

You have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Sit down little man.

Why the deceptively-named second account?

More than once I've seen an internet recipe on a large site where the person who submitted the recipe says what is published has minimal relation to what they submitted. All too often I see ketchup substituted for tomato sauce and a bit of sugar.

Professional chef of 20 years here. Old Betty Crocker cookbooks are absolutely essential in any kitchen library, and vary from year to year, so it is worth having several. Some of the best, most reliable recipes you will ever find will come from these sources. Your advice here is terrible. Don't give advice that you aren't qualified to.

As long as the recipes use standard measurements (i.e. no "knuckle of butter" type measurements) you are in great hands with Betty Crocker manuals and Joy of Cooking. Also, Julia Child and Jacques Pepìn are not from recent decades. It is difficult to overstate how terrible your advice here is.

Betty Crocker is a marketing invention. She is a fictitious character made to sell food: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Crocker

I don't think you know what you're talking about, lol. At least recommend someone that exists and has legitimately good advice and history like Julia Childs and The Joy of Cooking.

You obviously didn't read my comment. I prefer Joy of Cooking to Betty Crocker manuals, but both are written by teams of culinary professionals.

Edit: in regard to your rambling point about changes in food production and popularity of dishes falling out of style, my 2006 edition of Joy of Cooking has 8 recipes for aspics and savory mousses (like lobster). The recipe for turtle soup calls for 1 pound of canned or thawed turtle meat cut into 1/2 inch chunks. Please stop invalidating others' exploration into topics you speak so authoritatively of from a position of ignorance.

Your attitude which started with your first comment is terrible. You're getting what you give here.

Lurk more before you post.

> Betty Crocker is a marketing invention. She is a fictitious character made to sell food

Did anyone here suggest otherwise? It's just a brand name. Big deal.

So? Nobody thinks Betty Crocker is a real person.

Congratulations on informing us Buzzfeed writer.

I've never heard of butter measured in knuckles. I thought they used knobs?

Americans still use "sticks" for some reason =)

I can't not think of this song now when Betty Crocker is mentioned:

Betty Crocker's Bail by Clare Fader and the Vaudevillains - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpwhW_RrNOc

  Mrs. Betty Crocker is going to jail
  Her chocolate brownie cake mix is looking mighty stale
  Good ladies of the city are having a bake sale
  Raising necessary dough for Betty Crocker's bail

Exactly. What you're looking for here is a collection of various cookbooks that you use as a starting point to create your own recipes, which you collect an store in whatever fashion pleases you.

Gran might have used index cards in a box, I use a 3-ring binder, you might use a Wordpress installation on a vanity domain. Doesn't matter.

The Betty Crocker is a great starting point for a wide variety of dishes. America's Test Kitchen released a book with 100 recipes that covers a wide variety of basics. I have a copy of "Real Stew" that is invaluable. All these go on a shelf as reference, to be transcribed into your own recipe book as you choose.

I use my memory (my repertoire is small, and my recipes are not sensitive to quantities).

How can a professional chef end up on HN? I am curious. Did you turn into a dev later in life?

Chefs are most definitely hackers, just operating in a different medium.

Absolutely. And not just hackers, they're also, literally, makers.

More of a superuser than a hacker. General interest in technology my whole life. Still a chef.

There's a great YouTube channel I'm not 100% of the name since I subscribed ages ago.

Tasting history with Maximilian

And I've never recommended it to anyone but I bet if someone enjoyed your comment as much as I did they'd enjoy that channel!

Well, he did just recently cook and eat leather, the mad man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking

That one hasn't been the same since newer editions took out the illustrated how-to-skin-a-squirrel entry.

First catch your tiger.

substituting ingredients in recipes is a thing, but you can only stretch so far.

how many recipes for tiger are there, anyway? i can't really see it working in place of squirrel except maybe in sausage and Squirrel Surprise

I bought a copy of this for $20 recently. It has not failed me yet.

Recipes are not just algorithms for cooking food, despite also being a sequence of steps. They can vary by culture and personal preference. The most experienced chefs cook by sense, don't follow precise measurements, and often experiment by changing ingredients or amounts in different ways. This makes dishes interesting, and you learn what works and what doesn't in the process.

There's no optimal way to prepare food. Once you've found a recipe that you enjoy, save it, remix it, and share it with someone else. If a 1950s cookbook works for you, that's great, but you'd be missing out on a lot of good food if you only follow recipes from a single, static source. Maybe even that meandering blogger is worth reading; otherwise there are many tools out there that could extract just the gist for you.

Pro Tip: The 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the one you want. It's the closest thing to a "reference manual for food" that anyone has ever done.

When I was in my 20's I was able to teach myself how to roast a turkey by looking it up in the index and then doing exactly what the book said. Ditto for the Candied Yams, which I still get compliments on. Every single recipe was tested in a kitchen similar to what an average household would have had at that time.

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vintage-joy-of-cooking-cook...

ChatGPT can be a nice alternative to googling. It will just give you the recipe without the nonsense, and you can ask it to convert the units, suggest replacements for ingredients if you don't have / can't eat them etc.

With the downside that if you ask it to include iron nails in the recipe, it will gladly do so :)

You haven't experienced recipe hell until you have a child that runs up to you with a 10-second TikTok video and says "We need to make this!".

No ingredient list, no measurements, no temperatures, no times. Good luck.

As a counterpoint: I've had quite a lot of fun trying to determine a workable recipe with my teenage daughter from a short TikTok vid. It tends to involve a lot of screenshots and trial-and-error.

> for no discernable reason

This is why I really like Food Labs. This cookie recipe is the most famous example: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip...

They bake hundreds of cookies with different quantities of ingredient to show the effect that each ingredient has in the baking process. So now not only do you know what somebody's recipe is, but you also know exactly how to modify it to suit your own tastes.

it's the effect of years of unchecked SEO monopoly from Google. I hope ChatGPT can change that in some way or other.

try asking for chocolate chip cookie recipe on chatgpt, it works awesome already. The only issue i see is I can't verify in general if the recipe is accurate (like all things ChatGpt outputs). But these cookies i just happen to know are correct

Maybe chatgpt can fix the anarchist cookbook?

‘Cooking for Geeks’ chocolate chip cookie recipe arrives at an optimum among many input variations.

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