> When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice.

You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes:

"The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber

https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge

The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode:

https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45

That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.

I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.

I have a professional cookbook like this

Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.

Indeed. When I entered "grandma's cookies" into the shared family instance is 'mealie' I was sure to include a copy of the "original" index card. (surely a copy) https://imgur.com/KMSuUhz

That card was has several fun comments and lots of history to my siblings who added to the crustiness of this card.

The original card I remember said to use lard or you can use margarine if you "haven't slaughtered a hog recently".

The recipe in mealie was modernized and tested more.

Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.

I really wish I had kept a note of what my parents called "neeps and tatties" soup - which was served with thick oatcakes from the local baker.

I do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).

One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read.

Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?

When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.

> Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access!

I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.

LOL fork

Even regional differences in things.

If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.

Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.

> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.

This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.

What's even easier than measuring with a kitchen scale is just throwing the entire can in and calling it good. That's often why these recipes used "boxes", "cans", etc as units of measurement in the first place. By converting to standard units you're increasing the amount of effort needed to actually make the dish. It might be more in keeping with the spirit of the recipe to just substitute similarly-sized cans or boxes, even if it's not quite the same taste. It depends on your priorities I suppose. (Though either way it's probably good to include units for the sake of clarity and reproducibility: e.g. "one 16 oz can" rather than "1 can".)

RE: finding what "1 can" or "1 bar" was, you may be able to scour archive.org for scans of old magazines and newspapers to see advertisements or product listings for the respective product? At least, that's one route I'd consider

I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.

> It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.

Here in the UK, I get irrationally annoyed by seeing recipes that use "U.S." measurements. A "cup" is mostly meaningless to me as I've got lots of different size cups and as you state, it's not a consistent way to measure most ingredients (I can understand it being used for liquids, but even so why not just use ml or weight). When it comes to measuring larger ingredients (e.g. apricots) then the dimensions of this platonic cup come into play and I have to start deriving the optimal (almost) sphere packing to figure out how many apricots to use.

Often the precise amount doesn't really matter though. Likely it was "one can" to begin with because that's just what was convenient and not because the recipe has been optimized to that size.

I guess it depends how much you care about perfectly reproducing the exact same dish. For personal cooking I usually don't - a bit of variance is not a negative thing.

I recently made an old family recipe for carrot cake, and the cream cheese frosting called for "a box" of confectioners sugar and "a package" of cream cheese.

Yes, except for this part:

> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale

This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.

I was enjoying reading that until I hit this line:

> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process

Whatever the potatoes were swimming in, it wasn't gluten.

By the way, the discussion of mashed potatoes reminds me of the excellent old "Smash" adverts on UK TV that featured martians/robots and a tagline of "For mash get Smash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM

(Smash was surprisingly popular in the 1970s but then UK convenience food was abysmal back then)

The third footnote in that article, in its entirety:

> Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.

Is this what passes for a reference now?

Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.

> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.

Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.

You'll need many sets as US cup sizes are different to UK cup sizes and other customary units.

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.

A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.

I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.

The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter

>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

This site [1] has some interesting info:

[1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight." ---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67)

With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg).

[1] https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html

There are some baking recipes which measure the other ingredients relative to the weight of the eggs you have at hand. Like, "flour equal to twice your eggs weight"

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/

Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450

And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.

Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro...

If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.

Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...

I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).

They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.

If anyone needs to stay in their lane, it is you. Your analogy doesn't work either. I have my build scripting standardized and in version control. You can't change it because you don't have permission. Even if you did, I still have my copy. Your rude attitude is unwelcome.

The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update.

To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly.

"Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.

There's a hypothesis that some part of the obesity epidemic stems from the widespread use of powerful emulsifiers in factory-produced goods. They attack the lining of the lower intestines (basically mucous) and wipe out chunks of our gut microbiota. I have no idea whether this is true, but once you realize that even "fresh bread from your local bakery" is often made using factory-produced Sodexo dry mixes, you see how easily this could affect everyone.

Why would you try to imitate a boxed cake mix?

They don't taste better than making a cake from scratch. It does take some practice baking to do so, but that is just an adulting skill like many others. Home baking doesn't need commercial chemistry. Commercial bakeries don't need to warn the kids not to jump in the house when the cake is baking. They are totally different scenarios.

So you're telling me it takes one update to the recipe of the boxed mix and you can never reproduce your old recipes? Sounds like one should avoid using ready made mixes altogether.

Ive made great cookies from 100 year old recipes. Why do would i want a carbon copy of a store cookie.

Ive never used or really seem cake mix in stores my whole life. Feels... American.

>> Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.

Um. Ok. You say this like it's a good thing? I'll be honest, your statement makes me want that less rather than more.

Now granted, I never use mixes anyway, so I'm not the target market. I mean, baking a cake or cookies from ingredients is so simple a 5 year old can do it. my grandma likely never saw a pre-mix in her life, and would (very) never have used one even if it had been available. She lived on a farm, the idea of using a chemistry set to bake cookies ... well, you get the idea.

I gotta say, tounge in cheek, if grandma's can't bake cookies anymore because the box size has changed, well, I'm not sure they want to bake at all. Sounds like a convenient excuse to me...

But here's how to make your grandma really happy this birthday. Buy a few boxes and repack them into 18oz quantities. You'll be her favorite grandson forever. Or possibly not....

I'm thinking the same. But one of the other repliers pointed out specific ingredients and ratiod that are hard to reproduce, like gelifiers and specific leaveners.

My grandma would have scoffed at using cake mix, but she was coming "from the land" and "during", and anything prepared in manufacture was the devil. Her cakes were so much better than anything premixed I've tried. I also think know I just borrow from my own experience to evaluate what I consider to be grandma-like ; my judgment is highly subjective and probably biased by hallo.

We sometimes buy premixed when we're lazy, there's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like cheating. We love buying premixed chocolate chip cookies, and making one giant cookie in a dish - for whatever reason I'd never do that witg my own mix.

They could just sell the full package like they used to before if they don't want to change the packaging. The entire point of reducing the content is to mislead the consumer into not noticing a price increase.

Right. It's just a convenient side-effect that consumers are fooled.

Same people who have flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, milk ‐ pasta, rice, potatoes, ya know, food.

I don't eat a whole bag of rice with every meal. I have a plastic tub. Buy rice, fill tub, remove potions as required, repeat.

My pantry is full of plastic tubs with various staples. My veggies come in bunches. My eggs in boxes.

When did we become so helpless that "the box is the wrong size" became an issue?

Note that today, one can easily find cake flour that isn't chemically bleached. Also, shortening manufacturers have gone to fully-hydrogenated oils, rather than partially hydrogenated, to reduce the amount of trans-fats. But some are still using palm oil, so it's not a total win.

Cake mixes aren't just the ingredients in a convenient package. They're a complicated ingredient that produces different results than mixing from scratch.

Adam Ragusea did a piece on the differences awhile ago:

https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec

Boxed mixes came out of the same "scientific foods" fad in midcentury America that gave us things like Jello.

This sounds like the argument people make against Hawaiian food. Why use Spam! You can eat real food you know!

Thing is, once something has been done a certain way, it becomes a tradition in its own right. It doesn't really matter how it got to be that way, but once people have nostalgia for it, they want to keep doing it the same way.

As an Asian I understood this as the same as when I buy curry cubes from the store. It would definitely mess up my day if the size of a bouillon cube changed even though I know I could make my own broth.

Do you, does anybody, actually eat Campbell’s concentrated Cream of Mushroom Soup? It’s nominally a soup, but it’s designed to be an ingredient. It’s the foundation of all our favorite gloppy casseroles.

If you're only making cakes occasionally it's a pain to buy all the ingredients and have them sit around. Besides, even professional bakers use premix.

Homemade cake mixes rarely win blind taste tests against box mix. I baked two cakes with and without glycerol monostearate—it really does make a difference.

I think people know you can purchase baking ingredients.

There are both familiarity (consistency) and convenience aspects here.

There’s a standardization element. You can find the same premix anywhere in the country, at reasonable prices, and it keeps well. At competitive pricing, I would even tend to think of premix as just another bulk ingredient, like “1 cup flour” vs “1 cup premix FOO”. You can see this with baking powder, chili powder, and curry powder, which you could definitely mix yourself but few bother to do.

I'm glad it's not just anecdotal. I had an American colleague whose husband praised her amazing guacamole recipe. The recipe turned out to be a jar of guacamole and a jar of salsa mixed together. I may have forgotten the details but a jar of guacamole was certainly listed as an ingredient. I thought it was a joke!

I bet you couldn't consistently make a cake even half as good as a box mix for even triple it's cost.

People who don't bake often then baking is just throwing some stuff together and heating it up. It's very hard to get consistent results! It's literally an exact science. Did you weigh all the ingredients exactly? Did your mix and sift them evenly? Is your leavening agent fresh? Did you account for the humidity in your area and kitchen? Does your oven actually heat at the temperature it says? Does it heat evenly inside? Maybe you can pull off a good cake once or twice, but can you do it again, in a different kitchen? What about a smaller cake or bigger one? Box mixes take as many variables out of the equation as possible. They are very forgiving and delicious. There is no shame in using one for the home.

> (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need)

That stuff isn't just "preservatives" or whatever, it's the big difference in texture and flavor. I highly recommend actually trying a box-mix cake and a made-from-scratch mix side-by-side. It's incredible how different it is, especially with how little actual technique goes into the box-mix.

https://satwcomic.com/family-time

On the merits of using a presold mix, you're likely to get a smooth batter with much less stirring effort.

Depending where you are, low (and high) protein flour can be hard to find at the supermarket.

>Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird

Just think of it as the Arduino Nano/ESP32 module of baking.

> People don't seem to realize that you can just buy those ingredients yourself. It doesn't take that much extra time to measure them out, and it's way cheaper.

Yep, box cake mixes are a scam. They don't actually add any value, but people love to buy them because they (mistakenly) believe making cake is hard. In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.

Eggs can be considered continuous with a large enough volume of them.

You're cake is going to turn out fine with a bit more or less egg in it. Just adjust other liquids a bit to compensate.

Many recipes call for an egg and a white (or yolk) since it better approximates that scaling. Or if you double it, it becomes 3 eggs instead

What about liquid egg whites/yolks? Aside from the shelf life this always seemed like a key selling point to me.

You can just buy small eggs, and use them for fractional eggs.

Grocery stores sell different sizes of eggs over here.

Sure you can. Scramble them a bit and weigh them.

Cookies are surprisingly sensitive to slightly different ingredients or practices. e.g. Using different brands of butter, different sizes of eggs, or storing the dough at different temperatures can have a large impact on the final product, even though the same recipe was followed.

I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.

The tollhouse recipe is amazingly fragile. Slight variations in temperature can make the cookies "go flat" or end up with a thick skin. No surprise there is a variation of outcomes using older ovens that were very imprecise.

IIRC this would mostly be temperature offset + ease of oven temperature swings in response to introduction of thermal mass; plus humidity and altitude (= air pressure.)

(If you want to learn about reproducibility, look up what the factories making the packaged-snack version of your food tend to control for!)

Two main mistakes that people make: 1. "scoop and dump" approach to flour. Flour should be spooned into the measuring cup so its not packed in. 2. over-baking cookies due to cooking too long or oven that is too hot or not hot enough.

My brother set out to copy out mother's pie dough recipe, so had her do it in front of him. He recorded every measurement, each step of the creation process, but it didn't work. The result was a perfectly serviceable pie crust, but noticeably inferior to our mom's. Maybe the humidity in the kitchen, or subtle changes in rolling style... mom could do it every time and we couldn't copy it.

The truth is, we were trying to short cut past the effort involved of mastery by making hundreds of pies over decades...

Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!

Well I mean weight vs volume, actual oven temp, full fat vs skim, salted or unsalted. There's a lot of little variables even "following" a recipe.

Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.

As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.

I cut the sugar in grandma's limoncello by 30% and still end up with rocket fuel syrup which my friends think will cause sleep problems and diabeetus

That's one where I'm ok with people not having to do all the steps: I can't even imagine a grandpa try to distill alcohol in their basement or something.

Honestly I don't mind if people don't make everything themselves as there's always going to be a line where you go "well I'm not doing that" (you're probably not milling your own flour, growing your own wheat, milking your own cows, raising your own chickens etc...).

I just think they've tried to reach a bit far for a human interest angle - it's already annoying that customers are getting shafted, that's important! We don't need to spin a yarn about little Granny Scroggins cakes disappearing from the local church fair.

Ok so this is the cake pan thread.

They can shrink the amount of mix in a box but the hard limit of shrinking is the standard set of pans that everyone has. There are also bundt and springform pans in addition to the rectangulars. So if they shrink the amount in the box, as the original article mentions, they have to keep changing the recipe to increase the air and the rise so it still fits the same pans -- maybe badly. Or they just abandon the larger pans and don't offer instructions for them and it's up to the baker to buy multiple boxes and do the math?

I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.

What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.

And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).

Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.

(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)

You assume the average consumer is paying any attention to the net weight of their purchases.

Do you have price per unit on the price tags in your grocery stores? They have to show that by law in my country, not sure if it makes a huge difference because not everyone knows to compare though.

Sure, and ads are a nice thing on websites.

At one points, animated videos with sound covering all the content were too much, and people started installing adblocks.

Same with food, i never bought an 80g bar of chocolate and i never will, and i've gone home chocolateless because of that.

I've found the only way to buy potato chips economically is through Costco or Sam's Club. That said, frying them yourself saves money and is going to be more healthy.

It's better than nothing but not always enough. For example it doesn't help with products made up of different ingredients where some are more valuable than others and companies replace e.g. meat with more filler.

Also not all countries require the per unit price to be as large as the total price so you still need to make an active effort to accurately compare different items.

> (Tip for converting, if it's a European recipe assume 45g per egg), if it's US assume 60g per egg.

How did you arrive at those numbers? I (an American) have always understood one "standard large egg" to be 50g.

> A lot of food don't taste as good after being frozen (especially in a home freezer)

How you reheat the food makes a huge difference. Freezer => microwave is noob tier. What you want is something like: freezer => thaw 24-48h in fridge => stir fry for 5 minutes. Make some fresh pasta each time. Start preheating the oven right before your 1130 meeting starts. This stuff doesn't take that long. Adding a bit of extra ceremony on the backside can make a huge difference in the final result.

Just take your current favorite recipe and make more breading for the coating. That doesn't sound like there's much to actually do there.

Reads to me like he's doing an extreme version of the meal prep trend.

I have a pet theory that frozen microwave dinner instructions work the same way.

They always seem to turn out the same no matter how you cook them, yet the back of the box insists that you need to poke several holes in the plastic and stir it halfway through and let it cool for several minutes.

I'm convinced that they only add those steps to make people feel less guilty about heating up premade meals.

Self raising flour was invented by a British baker, Henry Jones, in an attempt to make better bread for sailors. We still have it in the UK and I never trust it, always adding baking powder anyway to cakes. We have plain flour for pastry and sauces and then bread flour (higher gluten) for bread. I always have three flours in my cupboard.

Self-raising flour is a British invention. We're also responsible for the Chorleywood bread process and probably other abominations too.

I lived all over the US when I was young. If I had to pick a part of the US that I most strongly identify with that kind of cuisine, it would be the Midwest, no contest. Other parts of the US used it to varying extents but in the Midwest it was a core part of the cuisine. They practically reveled in it.

Some of the casseroles constructed that way from those days were legit delicious but I haven’t seen or heard of them since the prior millennium. I’m not even sure if some of the prefab ingredients are still available. I’d eat some of those again in a heartbeat. You don’t see it on the coasts anymore but the tradition still seems to exist in flyover areas.

NB: I just googled some of these things and the recipes appear to exist online, I just don’t know where to buy some of the canned ingredients.

No, he didn’t. What he was referring to was combining finished products to create new dishes. Not using pre mix products.

That makes sense since it's an American dessert. Germany seemingly only produces the worst possible version of American bread and butter popcorn.

Puff pastry is also usually not the main part of whatever you're making but rather just something to hold it together. I see it more as buying pasta to go along my self-made stew - sure I could make it myself but for most dishes I wouldn't notice the difference. The cake mix is much more defining of the taste of the resulting cake so I'd want to have a say as to what goes into it instead of just using someone else's design.

Ok yeah I get that. It's certainly a shame for Judith.

But companies come and go. They change recipes all the time. They do research to make everything as cheap as possible, you may never know it but I knew someone working at Unilever and the Mars bar for example constantly evolves, and let me tell you it's not because they want to give you the best Mars bar, it's just "we found a cheaper supplier for X" or "If we replace X by Y we save Z, and you don't really taste it". I like our Dutch tomatoes: Big, deep red and absolutly tasteless. Now they sell "taste tomatoes", I'm not kidding, they're much nicer. Last much longer on a shelve as well.

Many, many products have changed and disappeared over the decades. I don't see anything worth reporting in the piece, except for "putting attention on shrinkflation". Which is fine of course, but Judith should know better, we all should.

Judith should take this as a generational learning opportunity to provide her children and grandchildren with memories that don't depend on a corporation not altering their products.

I don't mill my flour of course, I do get it at a mill which does, because I bake a lot of bread and 5 kg bags are cheaper.

That said, if you take my pancake example, you literally replace the flour with more expensive pancake mix. Ok, fine, in some mizes there are dried eggs and milk protein or something, and you just need water. But you could even make pancakes with water instead of milk and they're fine.

With cookies it's similar, most baking is just different amounts of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, milk/water. Maybe some vanilla sugar here and there. It's really not that hard. Hey, and now you can start to experiment with banana and almond flour, and make it a bit less unhealthy/more nutritious. Or make pancakes with oats and banana, also nice and a lot more fiber. Treat yourself to a nice kitchen machine with the money you save and become much faster as well.

Learning some basic, proper cooking and baking should just be part of raising kids imo.

I know it sounds snobbish, but it's really not rocket science. Imo we are being scammed by all these companies selling products that are just as much effort, but more expensive and less healthy (usually more additives). They just prey on our lack of knowledge with their recipes on the packaging and their products conveniently put at eye-height, whereas basic stuff like flour is always at the lower shelves.

The other weird thing here is passing that recipe along at all. People are impressed with boxed mixes? It’s just weird to me.

It doesn’t even make sense. Buying the individual ingredients is more versatile. You spend less money, and have extra eggs, flour, etc left over that can be used for other recipes. And then it actually feels more homemade too.

Saving 20 seconds (measuring and prepping 3 ingredients for a “mix”) in order to end up with less tasty food is illogical.

*edit* ok never mind there is some reason to the madness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45246000

Mill my own flour? I'd call that the "Carl Sagan fallacy" for the lack of a better name. We don't have to "[first] invent the universe from scratch to make apple pie". Even if that is what he literally said.

You have been able to buy milled flour for thousands of years, and will probably be able to for as long as there is civilization.

Betty Crocker would be lucky to survive another hundred years.

Please don't use HN for ideological battle. This is clearly against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is an article about cake and cookie mixes. Nobody has to buy cake and cookie mixes; the article actually covers a woman who has stopped. And even for other kinds of packaged food, if people can't count on the brand names they're used to, they're more likely to explore other brands or generics, so the sales of one particular brand could very easily go down.

While that is true, no one needs betty crocker food to survive. There is plenty of food in the grocery store that is basically not essential at all and exist because of price and value proposition, and this is the stuff people are turning away from now that the price doesn’t support the value. Even among stuff like cuts of meat, people are probably shifting to cheaper cuts and bulk deals.

Sales of betty crocker mix can go down.

Grandma will now search for a cookie recipe without the shrunken mix and go buy flour and eggs and vanilla sugar.

Um. I'm not sure anyone needs Betty crocker cake or cookies.

You can skip about 7/8ths of every grocery store and still get your calories and nutrients.

Maybe people will start doing that?

Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.

Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.

Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.

How is dumping a cup of Krusteaz and water into a bowl producing more dirty dishes than adding flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt to the same bowl? A couple measuring spoons?

The upside of having the ingredients is that you don’t need to specifically plan for pancakes. You can make them at the drop of a hat, along with many other things, as long as you keep the staples on hand.

My mom always makes pancakes from scratch, and she seems to have them together in just a few minutes as well. Last time when she asked if I wanted some, I said I didn’t want to be a bother, and she went on about how easy they are.

The main issue with a premix is like the article. It’s fit for a single purpose. I only make pancakes from scratch, admittedly I use baking powder and regular whole milk instead of buttermilk and baking soda. But the benefit is those staple ingredients can be used for all sorts of other recipes. I’m not going to bread chicken with Krusteaz. A premix can’t be adjusted either such as for altitude. Premixes and single use kitchen gadgets are areas where corporations really seem to have done a good job marketing that their products are more convenient than the readily available alternatives.

Because most people probably have all of those ingredients in their pantry anyways?

In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.

My only response to this is that you're doing it very wrong.

I can't tell if this is supposed to be ironic or not.

Is this satire?

You can actually buy stuff like that if you really want to keep a mix on hand.

The King Arthur powders are great:

https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/bakers-special-dry-m...

https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/dried-buttermilk-pow...

And I’ve never tried it but here’s powdered butter:

https://hoosierhillfarm.com/shop-products/butter-powder/

If you make everything from scratch you'll save so much money that you'll make out like a Disco Bandit?

In US recipes a cup doesn't mean whatever literal cup you have in you cupboard, it means 237ml. If you cook a lot it pays to have measuring cups of the appropriate size.

The factory must grow.

Ostensibly not since she didn’t bother changing the recipe when the box shrank to ~15oz.

For cakes, you often want less gluten (~7-10% protein) and that flour is not super common. All-purpose flour “works” but the product will be a little bit tougher because it a bit more protein instead.

As others have pointed out, you do need low-gluten flour, which you can indeed buy at any US grocery store, but it’ll cost more than just buying cake mix, unless you make a lot more cakes than anyone I know.

more like a funny sort of dependency drift

Not always. Canned tuna is my favorite. They shrunk the 6oz can to 5 over a decade or so. At one point I laughed at a 5 3/16 oz can.

Don't feed the idiological troll.

> There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch"

Growing up is figuring out there are no monsters under your bed but that you're sharing the planet with them

> It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch".

I don't buy it. A basic cake recipe is simple measuring (with enough tolerance that anyone can do it), mixing and pouring. No special skills required.

> Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard.

Ok, for sufficiently small values of "not quite the same", but so what? There's going to be more significant differences in your eating experience than the cake having a tiny bit more sugar or whatever. And companies change their mix all the time too.

The 15oz (pre-shrinkflation) Betty Crocker mix weighs 432g, 2/3 the weight of your recipe's flour and sugar alone, so your recipe is for a much larger cake.

Wal-Mart's own brand flour is about (Canadian) $C0.15/kg if buying 2.5kg, cake & pastry flour more like 24 cents/kg. Granulated Sugar is C$0.15/kg. I'm not sure where you're buying flour & sugar.

Your most expensive ingredient is butter but you could have easily chosen a recipe without butter. I reckon the cake with butter will be much better than BC's version though.

Other advantages of baking with a recipe are being able to scale the recipe up or down as needed, and always having the ingredients for many different recipes on hand without having to buy a vanilla cake mix, a brownie mix, a pancake mix, a waffle mix etc.

The main advantage of a recipe is tweakability. I find most commercial cakes far too sweet, and when I bake from a recipe I can find the point to which I can reduce the sugar without it becoming too bland.

I don't know whether they're harmful but I'm quite happy to cook a cake without Propylene glycol, Xanthan gum, cellulose gum, sodium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, and monoesters of fatty acids

I've always been baffled by the popularity of pre-made recipe boxes. Maybe useful if I was camping or something, but not when I have access to an actual kitchen.

So, cake flour?

> Because you have little kids and you want to give them a single easy-to-follow box with instructions on it?

Box mixes are a very US thing. I promise you that kids still get to bake in other countries. Having done both it is my opinion that messing with the raw ingredients is more fun.

Assembling your own cake mix is pretty easy if you really wanted to. Stick it in the freezer for whenever. However the prepackaged stuff is still likely to taste better because it uses industrial ingredients that will simply taste better.

A quick look at the first Betty Crocker mix I found on Safeway's site showed: corn syrup, xantham gum, and cellulose. Those will all contribute to the final texture and moistness.

Basic cake recipes are simple enough for even younger children to do and are a great way to teach basic cooking skills.

And if you only use flour and sugar twice a year then there's probably other things you would be better off making yourself.

I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.

My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.

But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.

SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.

i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.

Sure but then I'm sure people aren't boasting about their grandpa's tradition furniture build process that involves following instructions from ikea

The one from email spam circa 2003?