{"id":42515,"date":"2018-03-04T03:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T08:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42515"},"modified":"2020-07-26T15:38:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T19:38:02","slug":"the-dirty-secret-of-a-lot-of-traditional-family-recipes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/04\/the-dirty-secret-of-a-lot-of-traditional-family-recipes\/","title":{"rendered":"The dirty secret of a lot of “traditional” family recipes"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Atlas Obscura<\/em>, Alex Mayyasi<\/a> spills the beans about a lot of secret family recipes:<\/p>\n

When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on the menu: his grandmother\u2019s secret potato salad recipe.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told the chef, \u2018My very favorite potato salad in the world was the one my grandmother made,\u2019\u201d Meyer recalls.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a big statement coming from Meyer, a successful restaurateur who has earned Michelin Stars and founded the fast-casual chain Shake Shack. At the time, his grandmother had already passed away, but Meyer remembered that she kept recipes on three by five index cards. After a search, he found the right card and handed it to the restaurant\u2019s chef, who invited Meyer to try it in the Blue Smoke kitchen.<\/p>\n

When Meyer arrived, the sous chefs had a big bowl of potato salad that brought back memories of his grandmother. He tried it, smiled, and told the chefs, \u201cThat\u2019s exactly right.\u201d They grinned back at him mischievously. Eventually, Meyer broke and asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s so funny?\u201d A chef pulled out a jar of Hellman\u2019s mayonnaise and placed it on the table. Meyer looked at it, then realized that the secret recipe his grandmother had hoarded for years was on the jar. It was the official Hellman\u2019s recipe for potato salad.<\/p>\n

This actually seems to be a common phenomenon. The television show Friends<\/em> even features a similar discovery, when one character, Phoebe, realizes that her grandmother\u2019s \u201cfamous\u201d chocolate chip cookie recipe came from a bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips.<\/p>\n

Two months ago, we asked Gastro Obscura<\/em> readers to send in accounts of their own discoveries. We promised a (loving) investigation of grandparents lying about family recipes. But instead we got a delightful look at the power of imagination, the limitations of originality, and the halo effect of eating a dish or dessert made by family.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Atlas Obscura, Alex Mayyasi spills the beans about a lot of secret family recipes: When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on the menu: his grandmother\u2019s secret potato salad recipe. \u201cI told the chef, \u2018My very favorite potato […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,57,73],"tags":[1276,347,968,1388],"class_list":["post-42515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-humour","category-randomness","tag-cooking","tag-debunking","tag-family","tag-recipes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b3J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59125,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42515\/revisions\/59125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}