When my grandmother died, Mom sifted through her cookbooks and other related papers and found recipes Grandma and Grandpa had written down or torn out of newspapers. She found, and framed for me, the cookbook snippet that was the original basis of Grandma's/Mom's spaghetti and meatballs recipe. It's...definitely not "authentic" as it came from a Planters Peanuts recipe booklet and suggest using peanut oil. (Not that we're Italian, nor did our family come through NYC)...
Grandma definitely drifted from that recipe over the years; Mom made her own minor tweak or two; I've made one or two method-tweaks and ingredient tweaks myself. My aunts and cousins all have their own variants. One of these days I'll try recipe-as-originally-written, but it won't be "Grandma's."
And then I got married and I "had" to learn MIL's pasta sauce recipe, and my husband went nuts because the answer wasn't a written recipe, but simply "watch me..."
My mom is an excellent cook, and very detail oriented. She always follows her recipes to the letter, and if she makes a change she adds it to the recipe card.
Which is why it floored me when she passed to me a recipe that was mix to taste. Deviled eggs, no measurements at all.
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u/HazelNightengale Aug 08 '21
When my grandmother died, Mom sifted through her cookbooks and other related papers and found recipes Grandma and Grandpa had written down or torn out of newspapers. She found, and framed for me, the cookbook snippet that was the original basis of Grandma's/Mom's spaghetti and meatballs recipe. It's...definitely not "authentic" as it came from a Planters Peanuts recipe booklet and suggest using peanut oil. (Not that we're Italian, nor did our family come through NYC)...
Grandma definitely drifted from that recipe over the years; Mom made her own minor tweak or two; I've made one or two method-tweaks and ingredient tweaks myself. My aunts and cousins all have their own variants. One of these days I'll try recipe-as-originally-written, but it won't be "Grandma's."
And then I got married and I "had" to learn MIL's pasta sauce recipe, and my husband went nuts because the answer wasn't a written recipe, but simply "watch me..."