Shhh...It's a Secret!

I’ve never really understood the idea of recipes as great secrets, unless there is some commercial venture involved that needs to be protected. Household recipes, though, family recipes – why do they need to be secret? Is there so much prestige in having the best recipe for brownies? I can pretty much guarantee that even if I have the recipe for English Trifle, I am just as happy to eat it from the hands of the master as I am to make it myself. Happier, really, if it involves cherished memories of family, community or companionship.

I can also pretty much guarantee that a cook does not lose his or her job or notoriety for letting the recipe out into the world. Quite the opposite, in fact: no greater honour to the cooks who share than to have their names incorporated into the recipe names. Culinary immortality. I have recipes from my mother which declare themselves thusly, such as “Melba’s Never-Fail Pastry.” Who was Melba? Was that old Mrs. B, the widow who let us pick plums and cherries every year and who, every year for the longest time, brought us jars of homemade plum wine? Some titles are a little more obscure: Grandma’s Chocolate Cake. Was that our grandma, or our mother’s grandma, or someone else entirely?

The irony of recipe hoarding is this: no two cooks make a dish exactly the same way, despite using the same recipe. In Italy, this variability is acknowledged as a part of the cultural development of regional culinaria. The fact that two daughters from the same mother will make a family recipe a little differently from each other is a joyous reflection of the privilege of the cook to amend according to preference, to make do with what is on hand, and to express her own personality. It actually goes deeper than that; one sister may measure meticulously, while the other pours an approximate amount, one may prefer a different brand of a certain ingredient (or no longer be able to access a certain item), which can give rise to internal differences in the final product.

My mother's recipes are much like those many many people receive from their parents and grandparents - cryptically written, hastily scribbled on scraps of paper, and occasionally laboriously typed on a smeared index card with a two-tone typewriter ribbon. Used as bookmarks, stuffed into other recipe books, pressed between the world atlas and the dictionary (because the paper had gotten rumpled, and it needed pressing - then, we just became comfortable with that as the recipe's home). Two separate recipe boxes, one old, plastic and cracked, one new, metal and impervious. Magazine clippings, with adjusted numbers carefully annotating the original type in ballpoint pen. Regrettably, some of her recipes were only ever in her head, and are now lost to us, but it was never an unwillingness to share – sometimes, it just doesn’t occur to one to ask, until it’s too late.

There are dozens of ways for the passionate cook to collect and store recipes, from the classic recipe box, whatever shape it takes, to specialized binders that are pre-marked with category dividers, scrapbooks and, of course, in this modern age, computer software programs. There are free online recipe collections that one can browse and “collect” into a virtual recipe box, there are television-program tie-ins that offer recipes of the newest celebrities – the celebrity chef. There are many, many web pages devoted to the personal collections of like-minded individuals who want to share their little gems.

It's funny, because I consider myself tech-friendly for the most part, but I've never seen any recipe software that really appeals to me. In fact, one of the two reasons that I started my own web page was to finally get my mother's and my own recipes written down, and the modifications that I've made to other people's recipes noted in a more permanent fashion than scrawled slips of sticky-notes flapping out from recipe books and magazines. I started it as an archive for me, really, and a incidentally a place to practice writing.

My own as-originally-written recipes would be of little value to anyone else beyond the list of ingredients, because the instructions would often read "mix like biscuits" or "cookie method" or nothing but an oven temperature. My favourite instruction to myself, looking back at recipes laboriously copied out when I was around 12 years old, was this: Mix and bake. It looks as though I was worried that I might forgot that in order to make cookies, one has to actually combine the ingredients rather than just heap them up on the cookie sheet and wait for the magic to happen. When I started sharing my recipes with friends, many of whom had spent less time in the kitchen while growing up, I realized that I was going to have to expand my directions - which I have done, sometimes to ridiculous lengths, just because I want to be very clear about what I do for each recipe. You don’t have to follow it, of course, but it might help to know how the original went, exactly.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea of secret recipes, or – perhaps worse for its fundamental dishonesty – the practice of sharing a recipe minus one secret magical ingredient that makes the original so special. I’m more likely to press copies of recipes on hapless guests or exhort the charms of a special ingredient than I am to make a big production about the secret lineage of whatever I served to them. The more time I spend online, the more people I find who have just found a copy of a recipe that approximates the one that a departed relative took to the grave. Their emotions are bubbling over into the internet ether, a simmering cauldron of relief, joy, excitement, and more often than not a bitterness about the reluctance of Grandma Mabel or Auntie Jo to part with their secrets. I don’t want to be remembered with bitterness.

Food is hospitality. Sharing recipes is close kin to sharing food – along the lines of teaching a man how to fish versus giving him a fish. It is an act of kindness, of generosity, and part of the spirit of community. Besides, recipe-or-not, no one can make Pumpkin Cheesecake like my sister does.
 

September 2005