One day, that “secret family recipe” will just be that recipe their ancestor looked up online years ago and everybody liked.
I found out one of my family’s “secret recipes” is on the back of the pudding box. Uncle Rich bakes up some lies.
While researching his book The Nordic Cookbook, chef Magnus Nilsson found that every family in Sweden has a special, unique family recipe for pickled herring passed down secretly from generation to generation. He got about 200 of these. They were all exactly the same. He traced the origin point back to a popular cookbook published in the late 1960s. I think the moral of that story is everyone’s grandma is a liar.
I don’t think it’s about lying, exactly – both my grandmothers lived through that momentous changes of the 1950s when life went from the Middle Ages directly to the shiny and neon-white FUTURE, and we often discussed how frustrating that period was for them, because on the one hand, they could suddenly cook in half the time thanks to magic boxes and prepackaged shit and electric appliances, but on the other, every single husband in the continent was still clamouring to eat the same meals they’d known their whole lives, made the exact same way their mothers had made them, okay, and for women like my grandmothers this was such a uuuuuugh and Goddammit, Peter, situation because there were so. many. things they’d rather be doing – they had young children, and okay, but the post-war period was this exciting hub of new activities and weird classes and finally leaving behind the rationing and the worry and the constant, gnawing anxiety of the war and the last thing they wanted was to mash potatoes by hand in their kitchens when they could buy potato flakes for next to nothing and spend the morning doing yoga instead and yet men – they were suspicious and antagonistic towards any kind of technology aimed at women, weren’t they, and that’s how mothers and wives up and down the country started to bluff their damn asses off and Yes, dear, that’s aunt Clara’s recipe, that’s why it tastes a little different and Dont’ be silly, it’s been in the family for generations and Here, look at my cookbook, and there it would be, copied neatly by hand in blue ink: the back of a pudding box or whatever else, because grandmothers are like wizards and they never lie – they tell exactly the right amount of truth.
Good things that come from being on Tumblr for 5+ years:
By this point, you’ve either found a blog theme that you like or you’ve completely resigned yourselves to the default themes. Either way, you know longer care about your blog theme and that’s the way it should be.
You constantly gain a new appreciation for the, like, five followers that have followed you since the beginning.
You have a never-ending library of memes in your blog’s archives
If you ever need a pick-me-up, you can go back into the depths of your blog and find old content that you never thought you’d see again.
You probably never reblog unsourced/reposted art because you’ve been on Tumblr long enough to remember the original post in the first place.
A great appreciation for the updates that actually made the site work better (putting the reblog button at the bottom of the page, for instance)
A complete apathy to any sort of drama that this site devolves into.
You’ve probably discovered XKit by now and are grateful every day of your life.
You’ve seen and/or participated in some of the greatest events on this website, for better or worse (Mishapocalypse, the “reblog this if you’re in _______ fandom” posts, “What color is the sky?”, DashCon and the immediate fallout)
Bad things that come from being on Tumblr for 5+ years:
Different day, different discourse.
You’ve slowly watched people that you’ve followed for years go through eighty blog changes and that cool SuperWhoLock blog you once liked is now a belly-button fetish blog and you have to wonder where it all went wrong.
“Guys we literally settled this argument like two years ago why the fuck are we doing this all over again”
Living long enough to see people’s opinions on groups, events, and identities completely flip flop in the course of a couple of years.
Your block list is a mile long and full of porn blogs
Going from thinking that Tumblr was the best website ever to an old, jaded veteran who just wants to post memes is a very hardcore slide and it’s given me whiplash
Posts that you really used to like were deleted a long time ago back before deactivation was a thing.
Being 18+ years old on this site and knowing that the opinions of most of the users basically boil down to what minors think is social justice but really isn’t. Their hearts are in the right place…but… well, they’ve got a ways to go.
Out of the blue, someone will message you why you don’t post about certain shows anymore and you don’t have the heart to tell them that you haven’t tuned into that show in 4 years.
That would be because I haven’t posted it yet! Many people have requested the story mentioned in the tags “Grandpa Menaces a Peach Tree With A Baseball Bat”, So here it is, with a side of “Grandpa Menaces The Iowa Relatives With Giant Corn”
**
For the Full Context of this tale, you have to understand how my dad’s side of the family got to America in the first place. Prior to 1917, they were all farmers of limited success that migrated from county to county, trying not to starve, until a covey of the Fitzpatricks heard that they could be shoveling shit in Grand Americay, far away from the people they owed money to, so they all fucked off to Iowa and somehow made a fortune in the real-estate business in the middle of the depression. Despite now being comfortably middle-class, they never actually gave up farming, and having a pair of glowing green thumbs was a point of pride in the family.
So, when Grandpa moved out to California, specifically to the Salinas Valley, which is where an absurd percentage of the country’s food is grown because it’s full of probably the world’s most stupidly good soil, Grandpa had to continue the tradition and set up a garden in the backyard, planted various crops and flowers in January because fuck you this is coastal California, I can start stuff in the middle of winter, and invited his sister Leone and her growing brood of (at the time, 5, later 9 children) out to visit.
They came out in July, to escape the Midwest humidity and Butter fetish for a time, when the corn is typically getting to be around knee-height if things are going well. Grandpa spent a long time asking how things were back on the farm, plying them with ice tea and grandma’s lethal Angel Food cake, before politely inviting Leone and her Husband Scotty out back to see how his patch was doing, oh its not much really, just a bit of fun for me and the children-
Scotty and Leone stared at the nine-foot-tall goddamn corn which was already setting fruit because it had been going since January. At the watermelon plant that had taken over the side-yard, and at the other oversize and thriving crops that had taken over grandpa’s yard. There was a few moments of awed silence.
“Well fuck you Edwin.” Scotty eventually said, before Leone whopped him over the head and the rest of the visit was a pleasant diversion.
the following spring though, Grandpa received a package from Iowa, specifically a small peach tree with a note saying “With Love, Scotty.”
Leone knew better than to engage in such shenanigans, because this is irish-agrarian passive-aggressive Bullshittery at its absolute finest. “Sure, yeah, you can do corn. Any asshole can do corn. TRY THIS FUSSY-ASS PEACH VARIETAL INSTEAD, YOU ASS” is perhaps a more accurate translation.
Grandpa, not about to be intimidated by a mere tree, planted that sucker in the front yard and proceeded to pamper it- bone meal fertilizer, a brand-new irrigation system, the works. Hell, he would go out some times and talk to the darn thing. It flowered, and he borrowed a behive from one of the local farmers to make DARN SURE that it got pollinated, because he was going to mail peaches to Scotty for Christmas, that asshole.
The tree. Did not. fruit.
That fall, grandpa reccived a letter from Scotty, asking after a couple paragraphs of circumlocutions, how that tree he sent was doing?
Grandpa got up, made himself a martini, picked up Dad’s baseball bat, and walked out to the front yard to have a discussion with the Peach tree.
“I’ve just received a letter.” he explained, waving the paper at the tree. “Asking when you’re going to fruit. Now, I think I’ve held up my responsibilities to you as your caretaker, so it’s time for you to start providing. Do you understand? This spring, you better start fruiting or I will personally take this bat to you and turn you to into kindling.”
He stepped close to the tree, sticking his face in the branches as though whispering into it’s hypothetical ear. “Do not test me, you little shit.”
The next week, the tree bloomed out of season, and by February, it had set an obscene amount of fruit, which grandpa gleefully turned into preserves and mailed back to Iowa.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE:
I e-mailed dad to tell him that that peach tree story is much popular on this site, and he mailed me back with:
“You realize Scotty mailed Grandpa an ornamental tree right? It wasn’t supposed to fruit at all.
He was gonna tell Grandpa it was sterile on his deathbed, because Scotty was an ass like that. He was so mad when Grandpa mailed the peaches that he wrote a fairly nasty letter back accusing him of being a charlatan and that his corn was skinny and probably fake too. Grandpa was furious and mailed them polaroids of the tree to show that HE WAS NOT FAKING IT, THANK YOU, and Scotty accused him of taping store peaches to the tree, ad so on.
This went on for several years and got rather bitter, until the Iowans came out to California again, and Grandpa drove Scotty from the airport at ten at night to show him the goddamn tree, with the real fruit it was actually growing, thank you.
Scotty was about to argue with him when Leone whopped him over the head with her purse and said “If I hear one more goddamn word about this tree, they’ll never find your corpse. Now lets go in, I want a martini.”
Things got much better with the Iowans after that.
You should’ve heard Leone cackle when your grandmother showed up at Scotty’s funeral with a peach cobbler though.”
I’M FUCKING DYING. WE MOVED THAT TREE AFTER GRANDPA DIED AND IT’S STILL FUCKING FRUITING.
