Secret Recipes

[Absinthe]

It seems like everyone's mom/grandma/dad/grandpa has that one dish that is out of this world amazing, or that hits the spot like nothing you'd ever find in a Michelin starred restaurant could.

Sometimes it's a top secret recipe, closely guarded and passed down from mother to daughter as part of ritual of becoming a young woman.

Other times, it's a recipe from a bag of flour your grandma found back in the 60s that she thought looked kind of fun and that she'll share with anyone curious enough to ask.

...and sometimes it's the realization that your dad's signature stroganoff is actually just a packet mix, where he mixed up the quantities of liquid once and just kind of stuck with it.

What kind of secret recipes does your family have? Can you share them, or just make us all hungry with talk of delicious food?

I spent the better part of ten years trying to recreate a cheese sauce a grand-aunt of mine used to make. Alas, she passed away before she passed it along to her children - or to me - and I've spent a chunk of my early adulthood trying to make this sauce. I had it 95% of the way there, when I came across an old notebook of my grandmother's filled with recipes, including one for this sauce!

I've tried almost every kind of cheese I can think of that is even a remote match to the taste of this sauce. Supermarket brand cheese. Local farmhouse. Super mature. Freshly made.

My peeps.

She used cheese slices. The stupidly processed, may-not-contain-milk, most fake of American cheese. Emulsifiers and E numbers, people.

/sigh

 

[Floral Frolic]

My family has a lot of good recipes (my mother and grandmother especially) but none that are particularly secret. If someone wanted one, and asked for it, they tended to get it.

As a matter of fact, if anything makes them 'secret', its the fact that my grandmother has so many handwritten ones stuffed in binders or boxes that finding it again when you want it might be next to impossible. I've spent the last three holiday seasons trying to jog her memory about a particular cookie that she used to make when I was a kid. I know she had a written recipe, because I used to always look at it whenever I helped her bake, but now it's nowhere to be found and she doesn't remember. So. . . it's a secret lost in time now, simply because nobody can find it, haha!

 

[LunaValentine]

Let me think....I've got a lot of recipes for cookies. And one for skillet fudge from the depression era. The fudge is a very fine art to make but is pretty simple. Some of it is imprecise though XD like "some" of one thing or a "glob" of another.

 

[Nemopedia]

My dad actually made some good money on creating this one sauce. He sold the recipe to a few restaurants that aren't within competition range with him and really doesn't like sharing the recipe with anyone at all.

That's about as far as we go with secret recipes, since most of our recipes are eyeballed, though I remember being really surprised when my mom told me that the reason I couldn't hit one particular flavour note was because I lacked a dash of rice wine. Otherwise it is probably for the best that my parents guard their recipe secrets like they do, because it is the best way to lure me home.

 

[PeanutsandCoke]

I had a grandmother that used to make this meatloaf for dinners when that side of the family got together. Many wanted the recipe but she wouldn't give it out. Some even offered to buy it.
Before her health declined and she passed she specifically wrote out the recipe and gave it to me.
That was years ago. Me and my mother are the only ones who know the recipe to this day.
I also developed a barbecue meatloaf on my own. I've yet to share that recipe either.