Vent: My grandma's apple pie recipe was a bland mess until I found her old notebook from 1972.

For years I followed the typed card exactly, and the filling always tasted flat and watery. Last fall, I was going through a box in her attic in Albany and found her handwritten notes that called for a full tablespoon of lemon juice and letting the sliced apples sit for an hour before baking. The difference in flavor and texture was like night and day. What other 'secret' steps have been lost in your family's recipe cards?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylor_miller101mo ago

My mom's secret ingredient was apparently just forgetting to write down the salt.

terry6771mo ago

Got a story for you @taylor_miller10. My grandma used to make this meatloaf that was legendary in our family. One day I asked her for the recipe and she said "a pinch of this, a dash of that, and one secret ingredient." Turns out the secret ingredient was her forgetting to add the Worcestershire sauce for the last ten years. We all loved it and when she finally added it nobody could eat it.

rodriguez.felix26d ago

yeah that salt thing is way more common than people realize. my aunt had a chocolate chip cookie recipe that everyone swore by, and it turns out she just forgot to include the sugar in the written version for like twenty years. we all just thought they were supposed to taste that way. it's wild how our brains fill in the gaps with what we expect the food to taste like, so we don't even notice something's missing until someone actually follows the recipe exactly. i bet half those 'secret family recipes' are just happy accidents where someone left out a step or an ingredient and nobody ever questioned it.