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.
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