One day, that “secret family recipe” will just be that recipe their ancestor looked up online years ago and everybody liked.
I found out one of my family’s “secret recipes” is on the back of the pudding box. Uncle Rich bakes up some lies.
While researching his book The Nordic Cookbook, chef Magnus Nilsson found that every family in Sweden has a special, unique family recipe for pickled herring passed down secretly from generation to generation. He got about 200 of these. They were all exactly the same. He traced the origin point back to a popular cookbook published in the late 1960s. I think the moral of that story is everyone’s grandma is a liar.
Guys, I can top this.
It’s time for the tale of Great-Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese.
My Great-Grandma Mary was famous in her family for her macaroni and cheese. By all accounts it was an amazing mac and cheese- a baked casserole-style concoction of perfectly cooked elbow noodles and creamy, lusciously cheesy sauce. Because Dad loved it so much, it was always, without fail, sitting bubbling and golden in the dish set out on the dinner table just as he and his family arrived for visits, a testament to grandmotherly love and culinary mastery.
Fast-forward a couple dozen years.
My mother had never made macaroni and cheese. At the time she married my dad, she was a very good cook. She’d been cooking since she was about six or seven and had outstripped both her parents’ abilities in most areas. So when Dad started raving about Great-Grandma Mary’s macaroni and cheese, she did what any loving newlywed would do: she attempted to make macaroni and cheese.
According to all reports, it was an unmitigated disaster.
The sauce broke. The noodles turned to mush. The entire concoction was, in a word, inedible. Dad took one bite and spit it out. Horrified that her husband would do such a thing. Mom took a bite- and spat it out. It was vile. Mortified, Mom threw out the remains and vowed to obtain Great-Grandma Mary’s secret recipe.
Not long afterwards, they went and visited Great-Grandma for the holidays. As usual, there was the macaroni and cheese, laid out in golden splendor upon the dinner table when they arrived. Mom was finally able to sample the famous macaroni and cheese and pronounced it quite as good as Dad’s stories made it out to be.
After dinner, she cornered Great-Grandma Mary and spilled the whole debacle about her failed attempts to recreate Dad’s favorite dish, and begged Great-Grandma Mary to share her secret.
Great-Grandma Mary smiled and brought her and my father into the kitchen. Rather than reaching for a cookbook of family culinary wisdom, or into the pantry for a secret ingredient, she went to the freezer, opened it, and, as Dad looked on in horror, drew out a family-sized box of Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese.
“I have a casserole dish just this size,” she said. “I just pop it in there, sprinkle a little extra cheese on top, and nobody knows the difference.”
You would have thought someone had just stolen Dad’s teddy bear.
To this day, nearly twenty-seven years later, we still refer to Stouffer’s as ‘Great-Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese’.
