She's upset that the recipes are different

If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. 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. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.

When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.

I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. 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.

Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. 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?”.

Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.

Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.

Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?

Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!

Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?

> feels like something pretty straight forward to fix.

It is actually not. This is something I learned as a lad working in a bakery, professional bakers use all kinds of ingredients not readily available at home. Especially in e.g. boxed cake mix, it's actually a half dozen ingredients that are totally impractical to keep on hand. Various gums, starches, dextrins, mono- and di-glycerides, surfactants, encapsulated flavors, specific leavening ratios, basically the whole chemistry set.

The annoying thing is, the ingredient list says "modified food starch", but it could be any of a half a dozen different kinds of modified food starch, with different properties depending on how it's been modified and what the composition of the original starch was. Some are gelling, some are thickening, some are thinning, etc.

That's also why making your own cakes trying to imitate them quickly becomes a fool's errand. You're never going to beat the chemistry that's in the box, and even if you did it would look more like molecular gastronomy than baking.

> With that said, if the grandma's secret receipe is industrial cake mix, I don't know how much of a secret receipe it is

Ehh, there’s nothing wrong with a recipe containing a shortcut if it works, and standardizing on “a box of cake mix” as a measurement makes sense, because who wants to have 1/10th of a box of cake mix in their cupboard?

Speaking as an American, this is a part of American culture that's so weird -- using a pre-made mix as a base for a recipe that it's not designed for. That recipe looks like it just has flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt pre-mixed (with a load of other garbage you probably don't need). 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.

I've had the tiniest nagging confusion about that...

From what I recall, it seemed pretty common to use the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, yet somehow each family's cookies came out different.

My mom's instantiation of the bag recipe, for example, were pretty consistent across runs, yet not quite like anyone else's (that you're exposed to at friends' houses, school birthdays, bake sales, church potlucks, family reunions, cafes, ad photos, etc.)

The main problem here is that eggs are discrete, and you can't reduce a 30% when you use 2 eggs.

(Actualy eggs are classified by size, but nobody is going to search for the exact shrinked egg.)

Also, even a perfect escaled recipe will have different cooking time and temperature.

I can't find the article about it just this second but that's actually really common.

Greenbean casserole was invented by a Campbell's copywriter.

If the origin of these recipes was indeed Betty Crocker's own marketing department, undoing a very successful bit of advertising in this manner would be hilariously dumb.

In any case, it typically pays to carefully observe how people use your products before you change them.

Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.

Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.

Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.

(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)

The thing is that there is a greater incentive to shrink than to inflate prices. Or at least, to do a combination of the two.

Price-conscious consumers will probably choose the shrunk item over another brand that increased their price, even though the price per unit might be the same.

In Europe grocery stores are obligated to show the price/kg or price/standardized weight on the price tag.

Party size bag of chips is like $7.50 now. It’s absurd. I’m just buying potatoes and frying them up in a skillet lately.

The problem with expecting the fairy godmother of the market to fix food is that food is not a product consumers can go without. Sales can't go down.

Sales will, in fact, continue to go up as people now have to buy twice the item count to get the same calories.

The Market is not a benevolent magical entity. It is a machine that only has a single variable: profit.

But… the executive who juiced the KPIs and got his bonus will be a long gone.

I assume the boxes are tweaked to still properly make what they’re supposed to make. The issue is when people use them as a shortcut to make other things. At least that’s how I read it.

Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minutes of walking into the kitchen.

I looked into this not long ago, and the main ingredient that is hard to store the way you would a mix is fat. Most recipes need it, and “wet” fat like butter or oil behaves quite a bit differently than the milk solids or whatever else they add to premixes. It’s not impossible to account for, of course, but there is a real convenience factor.

The no-frills commodity mixes often seem quite cheap so it’s possible the price was still pretty fair.

I think you need 371 boxes of cake mix to skip rounding errors. Granny wants consistency.

A Sauceror? You can also make your own spaghetti and become a Pastamancer...

Shrinkflation has been a thing for a long time. It goes in cycles. They shrink everything to preserve their profits in lean times, then in a few years they will compete with each other by adding the product back. You’ll see boxes with labels like, “now with 20% more ______!” All they’re doing is giving back the product they took during the shrinkflation era and acting like they’re doing you a favor.

Aka Betty Crapper.

Because they're not actually "overpriced"? A BC chocolate cake mix costs $2 at my local store. Let's compare to a cake recipe using ingredients from the same store and using this recipe [1] and this weight conversion chart from the recipe authors [2]. For grocery prices, I'll be picking the "normal" size item as if you were stocking a kitchen pantry (e.g. the 5lb bags of flour and the 4lb bags of sugar, not smaller "half the amount for twice the price" packs, but also not bulk packs).

* 270g flour: 65¢

* 6g baking powder: 10¢

* 3g baking soda: 1¢

* 4.5g salt: 1¢

* 64g cocoa: $1.15

* 354g sugar: 90¢

* 113g butter: $1.42

We'll skip the vanilla, milk and coffee in the KA recipe on the view that we're substituting for Betty Crocker cakes here, which aren't likely to have coffee and vanilla extract in them.

Both recipes require the baker to supply eggs and oil. KA wants less oil but one additional egg, the BC box mix wants more oil but one less egg. Calling it a wash here.

So the total cost for our home made cake, using just the portion of the ingredients that you (should) already have at home is: $4.24, over 2x the box mix. Even if you take out the chocolate and go for a plain vanilla cake, you're still taking $3.09. That KA recipe might taste better (in fact, it probably does based on my experience with KA recipes). But I'm not sure it tastes so much better that I wouldn't rather save the time and dishes.

[1]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-cake-reci... [2]: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...

According to some (youtube) experiments, commercial brownie mix produces some aspects of brownies more consistently because it's ground finer (and mixed more uniformly) than the ingredients you can usually source. So it's not quite that simple (though it mostly is.)

Because you live in a small apartment and don't have storage space for a thing of flour, a thing of sugar, cocoa you might use twice a year?

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

Because you value convenience?

Honestly, what a silly take. The world thrives on convenience products.

I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.

He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.

The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!

Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.

The people relying on cake mid probably don’t have any of that in their pantry.

Is every batch $50, or is some of the cost from stocking up on some uncommon ingredients?

Which recipe are you following? I found a few, including one on the Neiman Marcus website, but none had pecan flour and only one had walnuts.

There are professional bakers that use cake mix. Cake mix is basically the exact same ingredients as one would use if making their own, sometimes with the addition of ingredients that are usually improvements but that almost no home baker would regularly carry. Among all the various pre-packaged/pre-prepared ingredients, dry cake mix is probably the one for which pretentiousness about quality makes the least sense. And this comes from someone who never uses them and makes 100% of my own cake batter....but that's because my family bakes enough that I always have all the of the necessary ingredients on hand, so there is almost no extra convenience for us.

The overwhelming majority of American women old enough to be grandmothers use cake mixes. For that matter, professional bakers often use cake mixes, including my uncle, who insisted on Duncan Hines brand. But more importantly, this idea that grandmothers made everything from scratch is outdated at best. Making everything from scratch is like woodworking. It’s a great hobby, you get amazing products out of it, it makes for nice Instagram videos, but it only makes sense for people who enjoy the activity in itself. The rest of us are buying cake mix and premade furniture.

A lot more precision and control goes into those cake mixes than the combination of ingredients you are likely to use at home. For baking in particular this matters if you want consistent results. The ingredients themselves are not all that special.

Why?