There are a lot of recipes out there that use boxed cake mixes off-label. Like I saw Dylan Hollis make something that involved one can of pumpkin puree and one box of spice cake mix. There are a lot of things like that which are going to break if package sizes change.

They may not be authentic homemade gourmet organic quarter sawn BPA free low sulfur fair trade influencer grade but there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for recipes like that because it’s what mama made in the 80’s, and we used to sit around that godawful yellow table with that one chair that had a gash in the back, you remember that? And she’d put that icing on it, that cream cheese icing.

The image I hate most is someone trying to do the old thing of one box of this, one can of that, the batter’s not how they remember but whatever, bake…doesn’t come out right, over bake…what’s going on? And now we’re wasting food because “a box of cake mix” isn’t what it used to be. All because we suffer a few billionaires to live.

Cmon man, there’s two kinds of recipes: one with exact measurements and precise instructions, usually written in metric with a lot of notes and contingencies… and then there’s general guideline cheat sheets and refreshers, which you use when you already know how to cook it.

If a recipe tells me “a couple spoonsful” and I don’t know what to do, the problem is not the recipe, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.

So what do you do? you learn. or I guess you could be like NileRed and watch food burn in front of your face because you don’t want to deviate from the recipe. over and over again. but hopefully you’ll learn to deviate soon.

That doesn’t really help when you need X amount of something and everything is sold in Y amounts.

While some ingredients this isn’t an issue, I’ve run into this for pasta sauce/paste, coconut milk, canned beans, etc. which are hard to work around.

My point is, all she did was change butter for oil. She didn’t do anything special or fancy like your suggesting.

I work around it fairly often. It can be inconvenient for sure. I think I end up avoiding those types of recipes if I’m not going to be cooking with those ingredients often enough. But for ones that I do, coconut curries funnily enough, I just deal with having some in my fridge at pretty much all times.

Other times I substitute the canned/frozen version for fresh since you can buy the right amount.

Well…

World War 1 happened. there was rationing.

Then the 20’s happened and grandmothers disappear from the historical record, they either became flappers or were shot to death with a Thompson submachine gun in a speakeasy. RIP roaring 20’s grandmas.

Then the Great Depression happened and the only foodstuffs that existed were peanut butter and saltine crackers.

Then World War 2 happened, there was rationing again.

Rationing ended in 1947, and basically everything in America changes. GI’s returning from war 1. fuck the fucking fuck out of the women, resulting in more pregnancies than Earth had ever seen before. There’s a housing boom, they skin the continent of old growth pine to build suburbs, with adjacent business districts full of supermarkets complete with large parking lots for the family car. These supermarkets are full of mass manufactured packaged food, some of which use technologies developed for military rations. We enter the era of the boxed cake mix, the canned cake icing, and the frozen TV dinner. All of this is new and exciting, and the marketing poses industrial made foods such as shortening as more scientific and purified than natural food.

I got this from a comment under a Youtube video, responding to why Jello was so popular in the 1960’s: Because a gelatin mold was seen as an impressive feat of housewifery. Much earlier than 1960 and gelatin is a pain in the ass to make but now that it’s a commercial product that comes in a box, you pour the packet into some hot water and stir and bam, it became quite a trend. The same happened with cake. Pour a box of powder in a bowl, dump in 2 cups of water, stir it a little and then pour into pans and bake. Betty Crocker had to take the egg powder back out of the mix because market research showed housewives felt underwhelmed, baking with all-in-one mix didn’t feel like enough of a project. So make them provide their own eggs I guess.

So the Greatest Generation, my grandparents, bake like that. Because all the hip keen 25 year olds are baking like this, MOM, I can make a whole cake in an hour, I’m icing while you’re still sifting that flour. That’s how they teach their boomer daughters how to bake, and the average boomer housewife is at a loss as to how to bake a cake without a box of Betty Crocker.

Gen X has never and will never exist.

Millennial women seem have a complicated relationship to baking. On the one hand, there’s an entire genre of television/Youtube about baking cakes aimed pretty much at millennial women. Find me a woman in her 30’s that doesn’t have a strongly formed opinion on fondant. That’s what they watch when they’re temporarily sick of True Crime. On the other hand, feminism’s distaste for women in the kitchen has lead to a lot of women having no discernible cooking skills. I’m a better cook than most of the women I’ve dated, and most of the women I’ve dated I wouldn’t trust to own a sifter or a rolling pin, particularly the city dwelling Democrat voters.

Gen Z? Like they’re ever going to live somewhere with an oven.

Yeah but a can is basically one unit. Once a can is opened it usually has to be used relatively quickly, so I would much rather use an entire can than measure out a fractional number of cans to be precise with measurements. It depends on the ingredient of course but eg with beans it really doesn’t matter to get the exact weight.

If it says a couple spoonfuls then you are golden to abandon all fear and just go with it. That’s half my curry recipes. How much curry do you want? How much can you handle?

Which is why a lot of recipes will say “One 14 oz can of…”

as they should

But they didn’t start saying that until 2008.

HAHAHA that recipe is half a dump cake.

Completely picking up what you’re putting down regarding the dollar value and if I’m being honest was probably going to find an alternative way to access rather than purchase. Our libraries offer pretty much every book as ebooks on loan and for informational non fiction works you can usually glean the majority of the content through a quick peruse in-store or online synopsis.

Personally I do little baking but have been the primary cook in our household for the past 8 or so years and have been noticing that my dishes have been improving a lot lately due to noticing some ratios (particularly in pasta dishes, carbonara especially) that seem to work really well with what the family likes. These are probably rather personal and the missus does also somewhat despise that I generally never make the same thing twice cause I’m always tweaking things depending on available ingredients & whatnot, basically cooking from experience and feel. So I also agree with what you’ve mentioned around learning from doing and bringing in the look, feel & smell components to aid that learning.

The smell of things has made a huge difference in my cooking as well once I started to pay attention to when I could smell that things were done (mostly bbq and baking) - nothing more disappointing then following a recipe to the letter and coming out with an over cooked lamb shoulder (just one somewhat recent experience).

Why this was interesting was because I’ve realized that having a few ratios/rule of thumbs that relate not just to ingredient ratios but also to cooking times and styles I can be way more flexible and adventurous in my cooking while maintaining mostly consistent flavours and (more importantly) a happy family.

Also realizing the importance of trusting that you know your own appliances/cooking environment best has been helpful lately. Going back to the lamb shoulder comment, the recipe asked for me to have the grill at medium heat or about 150’ Celsius for like an hour. For me to get my bbq up to 150’ took a lot (it’s a six burner, so lots of space) but I was determined to follow the recipe to the letter and instead what I did was I ruined the dish. Everything was telling me that it was too hot (dials were past mid way, fat flare ups, etc) but instead of trusting my instincts and adjusting to my conditions I just blindly followed the recipe.

So yeah, bit of a lengthy comment but love simple ratios like a 3:1 for a vinegarette and feel like I could definitely benefit from some more knowledge in that area to further bolster my cooking skills. I’ll check out a couple of the youtubers you mentioned and go from there, cheers

Sprinkle on some Glorm to taste, or for you midsouthnortherners, pour in some Old Undeserving Chattal Slave Mamy’s for a similar effect

Mfw (I am in the Middle East and my understanding of American food is exclusively “<verging-on-parody tuple name> Whopper” (this is a 30 second explainer on how to boil a potato))

Hydration level comes first. Everything is built around that

Because of this I won’t buy any box mixes anymore - they were almost always overpriced for what you got and didn’t contain anything magical… They just made things simpler. I’ll make my cakes and cookies from scratch now and save a fortune.

This is the way.

There are recipes based on package sizes which is fine for chocolate chips or nuts but becomes intensely problematic when it is leavening ingredients. Half-a box of bisquick was a valid measure when there was one size on the shelf.

Some of my family recipes go back 150-250 years so along the way some of the collection contains cards calling for a tin of x, y, or z. I still sometimes use a ham glaze that calls for a bottle of coca cola.

You have a different quantity of leavening relative to ypur fats due to the size change. The whole thing will be goopy until you sort out the baking soda/powder which can get difficult since you use so little relative to the volume of the batch.

Hadn’t heard the term before but it does look like it.