Making Traditions, Baking Traditions

Keeping Recipes Alive

Like many things, recipes are passed down from generation to generation. And as technology advances and lifestyles change, family recipes change too. With each generational change, bakers face new challenges in the constantly evolving task of keeping family foodways alive.

In Mauricio’s family bakery in Oaxaca, Mexico, bread dough is made with manteca, or lard. In the United States, using lard is a dealbreaker for vegetarians and vegans, and the lower quality of the lard generally available stateside gives the ingredient a bad rap. So, when we make pan dulce, we use butter instead. Is it better to prepare bread the traditional way if no one can enjoy it? Or is it better to adapt the recipe, knowing that we’re making it less authentic but more accessible?

The process of bread baking is different in Mexico too. In Mauricio’s family bakery, dough is mixed by hand in a wooden trough and baked in a wood-fired stone oven. Adapting the family recipes to a commercial stand mixer and a convection oven presents a conundrum: if a recipe stays the same, but the method changes, the results change. To create the same results, the recipe must change to compensate for the altered method. When contemplating authenticity, what’s more important: the process, or the end result?

My Oma in the ‘60s

One of the challenges I commonly face when trying to recreate my family recipes is that, like many recipes developed in the middle of the 20th century, many of them use ingredients that are measured by package size. Even for products that have stayed the same over the last hundred years, if the package size has changed, my resulting recipe will be different. I find myself Googling “How many grams in a box of powdered sugar?” and “How many cups of evaporated milk per can?” often.

As someone who is passionate about supporting the local food scene, I contemplate the importance of each ingredient in a recipe. Local producers can make the best eggs, milk, honey, and more, hands down. But if the recipe calls for a processed version of one of these raw ingredients, I must decide what approach to take. Do I buy the commercial sweetened condensed milk because it makes the recipe according to my family tradition? Or do I find a way to substitute a local ingredient which requires more work on my part and means the end result will be delicious, but not quite the same?

Mauricio and I are lucky that most of our parents and grandparents are still alive and continue to cook and bake for us. This kicks the can down the road somewhat; our family recipes are prepared for us in the most authentic way by the people who have been preparing them for us our entire lives. But we’re also aware that as time goes on, we’ll need to take on more and more responsibility to keep our family food traditions alive. In doing so, we’ll need to decide what recipes can stay the same, and what recipes will need to change, hopefully for the better. Only time will tell if our decisions will be the correct ones.

Of course there’s always the temptation to stuff the old handwritten recipes from our grandparents away in a recipe box in the back of the cupboard. We may be tired of rotkohl and blutwurst, and if you have German ancestry like I do, you know exactly what I mean. But as the way we cook and eat and the ingredients we use change over time, the recipes gradually become disconnected from our new realities and the realities of those who come after us. The only way to keep our ancestors’ recipes usable is to, well, use them. And that sometimes requires making changes.

Not to get too philosophical, but when I think about change, I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages by Carl Jung.

“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worth while for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know.” -Carl Jung

So, I propose we keep making the recipes that have been passed down to us and entrusted to our care. Sometimes that may require tweaking ingredients and adding a few notes to the recipe card. Sometimes we should think changes through first, and other times we should just go with what our intuition tells us. But if our dedication to keeping our ancestral foodways alive means the next generation can too, I think the challenge is worth it.

This week’s recipe is for my Oma’s Chocolate Cake. Yes, I did make a few adjustments. I changed some ingredient measurements from boxes and scoops to weights. I also explained some old baking techniques in a bit more detail so they make sense to modern bakers. And, in keeping with the full-inclusion flour theme of this Substack, I of course replaced the white flour with full-inclusion flour. Bake the cake, eat the cake, taste some history, and think of my Oma as you do it. Let’s get baking!