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TIL my grandma's pie crust recipe changed because of the butter
She always used margarine in the 80s but when I asked her to teach me last year she switched to real butter and said the texture got so much flakier that she never looked back, anyone else's family recipes shift with the ingredients over time?
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elizabeths514mo ago
Margarine was everywhere back then, my mom used it in her chocolate chip cookies until like 1995 when she saw a documentary about trans fats. It's funny how things shift without us really noticing, like how everyone I know has slowly switched from vegetable oil to olive oil for almost everything. I bet a lot of old family recipes have quietly changed over the years just because we have better ingredients available now. The flakier pie crust makes total sense though, butter has that water content that creates steam in the oven and gives you those layers. It's cool your grandma was willing to adapt instead of just sticking with what she always did.
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kellyjones4mo ago
And it's cool your grandma was willing to adapt" - that part really stuck with me. It's like we all have this unspoken rule that grandma's recipes are sacred and you can't change them, but the reality is that cooking has always evolved. I've noticed this bigger pattern where people treat their parents' or grandparents' methods like gospel, but nobody stops to think that they were probably just using what was cheap and available at the grocery store in 1975. My aunt still swears by Crisco for pie crusts because that's what her mom used, but she never actually tried butter to see if it's better. It's funny how we romanticize old techniques when half the time they were just working with limited options. Makes you wonder what ingredients we're using today that people in 2050 will look back on and be like why did they cook with that stuff.
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