FOOD THREAD – Sunday 12/01/2024

[Greetings to all of you who have come here for an exposition on the finer pleasures of cooking and dining. This is certainly the place to find it…but not today. Your regular host, Mr. CBD, should be back on the job by next week. Until then, here is a little something to chew on. – Buck]

Family Recipes versus Shrinkflation

There is not much I can add to how annoying it is when product sizes are made incrementally smaller. It epitomizes the quietly dishonest, business school philosophy that margins can be improved by shrinking a product’s size while holding the price steady. In this era of high-inflation, shrinkflation is also being used to disguise the inflationary increase in price per unit, since each unit is now smaller. But no one is being fooled, as more units must now be bought to get the same volume as before, which also means more packaging, with all the costs and waste involved in that.

For heirloom recipes, shrinkflation is especially frustrating. My wife is a punctual, organized person for whom recipes are not suggestions, they are a precise roadmap. She has a few cherished recipes for side dishes that are an important part of our holiday meals. But these recipes also date back to before MBAs shrank the ingredients. So, we end up buying more of each component ingredient to ensure there is enough, which must give the business school graduates a big smile. They successfully turned a two-can purchase of corn into a three can purchase, with some accompanying waste.

How Many Sodas in a 12-Pack?

Related…

My wife is a fan of a soft drink named Zevia.

Over the years, the large multipack had shrinkflated from a 12-pack to a 10-pack, and then to an 8-pack, all before the latest round of Bidenflation. But Zevia can’t shrink the multi-pack any further now, since they already sell 6-packs, so instead, they have gone full circle, bringing back a 12-pack as the large multi-pack. I’d like to see more of this. Maybe one day a can of vegetables will be 16 ounces again, and a box of tissues won’t get wiped out by one sneezy day.

A “pound” of coffee has been steadily decreasing from 16 ounces over the years. Maybe when a “pound” of coffee is reduced to 8 ounces, a “double pack” of coffee at 16 oz per package will be re-introduced.

The “Floz” as a Unit of Measurement

Speaking of ounces, many recipes refer to a volume of liquid in terms of “fl. oz.” I’m certainly not the only person who refers to the unit of measurement as a “floz,” am I? If my wife and I are cooking and the recipe calls for a cup of milk, then I tell her it requires eight “flozzes” of milk.

Un-Sweet Potatoes

In my half-century-plus on this planet, I somehow still find that there are foods that I was always “wrong” about, and one of them is sweet potatoes. I spent most of my life thinking I didn’t like sweet potatoes, probably because my early exposure to them was canned, candied yams that were served at holidays. While I have always had a sweet tooth, I generally don’t care for sugary sweet stuff on my plate while I’m eating my savory entrée and sides.

Only in the past few years did I finally try sweet potato fries and baked sweet potatoes with nothing sugary added to them. Absolutely delicious! Who knew?

But – I’m still hesitant to order sweet potato fries at a restaurant, because too often they add cinnamon and sugar to them.

Do y’all prefer savory sweet potatoes or candied sweet potatoes?

Are any of you like me in seeking to keep savory and sweet from mingling on the dinner plate?

Cornbread and Syrup

But…if something sweet is supposed to be the main course, somehow that is different. “Breakfast for supper” that prominently features pancakes and waffles is always a treat.

When I was a child, my father would occasionally prepare a Sunday night dinner for us kids of cornbread and syrup. When he was a child during the Depression and WWII, that was a common meal served to him and his sister by my grandparents as they juggled money and wartime rations.

When my father served it to us, it was a nostalgic meal for him, and a treat for us kids. Now that I think about it, I’m overdue to have cornbread and syrup for supper.

Author Brandon Meeks, known on Twitter/X as “Shelby Foote Appreciator,” and a caretaker of southern culture, recently had a tweet about making the poor man’s delicacy, “hot water cornbread.” I wasn’t sure what that was, so a little internet searching revealed that “hot water cornbread” is another name for hoe cakes, or johnny cakes, which is fried cornmeal flatbread. It is frequently served with butter and syrup, like a pancake.

I realize now that the cornbread and syrup of my grandparents was actually a midwestern variation of hoe cakes.

Internet Recipe Essays

So, I decided to look up a recipe for johnny cakes, and I was re-exposed to one of the most bizarre and irritating things on the internet…the recipe essay.

You click a link to a recipe for a dish you wish to cook, and then it starts with a description of the dish, followed by ads, followed by a history of the dish, followed by more ads, followed by more paragraphs discussing the pleasures of cooking, which seasons of the year this dish is associated with, where the component ingredients come from, etc. Trying to get to the list of ingredients and how to prepare them becomes a quest.

I understand putting some ads in the website, but what is the purpose for the interminable essay that must be plowed through to get to a recipe?

Smoked Bologna Redux

The previous time that Mr. CBD called me up from the bullpen the concession stand to fill in on a Food Thread, I discussed the East Tennessee delicacy of smoked bologna, which I hadn’t yet tried.

Well, I’ve tried it several times now, including in my new favorite breakfast biscuit: Smoked bologna with egg and cheese on a biscuit. It’s fantastic! I wish I had taken a picture of it, as the thick circle of bologna had a black exterior ring from the smoke, leaving no doubt that this was not a mere slice of Oscar Meyer cold cuts.

Leftovers

I once had a co-worker who would bring leftover-turkey gumbo into the office the week after Thanksgiving…always a treat.

As you enjoy your Thanksgiving leftovers, please feel free to share in the comments some of the creative things you are doing with your leftovers.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 04:00 PM

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