Speaking of recipes....

[brooksmoses]

I was reading my grandfather's recipe for spaghetti sauce -- which makes over 3 gallons, judging by what goes into it -- and thinking, "Only four ingredients? I was sure it was more complicated than that!" The four ingredients, for the record, are four large cans of tomato puree, and some hamburger, pepperoni, and sausage.

Then I actually read the directions, which involve frying an onion in olive oil, making meatballs with the hamburger and bread crumbs, eggs, salt, pepper, garlic salt, et cetera., and realized: Those are not the ingredients in the sense of everything that goes into the sauce. Those are just the things that you need to buy. Everything else is just stuff that Granddad would have automatically had around the kitchen, like the knives and hot water from the tap.

Comments

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Hot and cold running onions. I like it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My mother has remedied some of this when she passes recipes on to me, but it's interesting to me to see how this changes with time and also with personality. I think a lot of avid cooks of our generation would still consider plenty of onions to be a thing you just have, and its replacement with garlic is pretty idiosyncratic on my part; on the other hand, bread crumbs and garlic salt are not things I stock and not things I assume others will stock.

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

This.

When my mom wrote down grandma's recipes, she had to watch her make each dish to really see what was needed. Grandma didn't do units or measure much because she knew what she meant.

Transferring this to something that the rest of us could use took work. It was worth it.

[brooksmoses]

Yup. The thing about my grandfather is that for about 25 years he owned and ran a seafood restaurant, so the things he would be likely to have around the kitchen were a bit idiosyncratic. (Especially for the recipes adapted from his restaurant cooking rather than his home cooking. White sauce mix or brown sauce mix were, as far as I can tell, basic staples of his restaurant cooking.)

I also occasionally envy the kitchen that led to his fish chowder recipe; that was clearly a kitchen where there were leftover bits of a half-dozen different kinds of fish. You can do that at home, but not without knowing a good fish market (and the one I know probably uses their small scraps for their own fish chowder!).

[mopalia.livejournal.com]

Generally, I have all those things. I used to be ready to cook almost anything, but I've been sending a lot of Western ingredients off to my son and his girlfriend, who still cooks Western. I realized that I had completely embraced Korean cooking when I impulse bought two beautiful Napa cabbages at the farmer's market and found I had all the ingredients I needed to make another batch of kimchi, even the brined baby shrimp, without shopping.
Although, I would never use garlic salt. I have lots of fresh garlic, always. There is no food without fresh garlic. :)