I learned a lot about cooking from the women in my life…. my mother and especially from my grandmother. “Mimi” loved to cook and in her professional life ran a test kitchen for one of the biggies. Her best advice: “the problem with most recipes is that they have been limited by reducing the time required to make them with unfortunate shortcuts or reducing the quality and variety of ingredients.”
So, if you want to make something memorable for a special occasion and you are ready to throw yourself into making the best… here’s a few ideas on how to approach upgrading your recipes:
Let’s look at a completely Italian-American Invention… “Marinara Sauce”:
Survey the Ingredients lists from various recipes:
We should also look at ‘Spaghetti Sauce’ recipes… so I added a few additional items that occur in some of these sauces at the bottom of the list.
As you can see, there are a lot of similarities… but the differences are significant and reflect issues of ‘cost’ and ‘steps.’
Developing the proportions and the steps are next….
Roger Freberg