To think there is a MORAL OBLIGATION to share recipes if asked?

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Look, it's just a pickle recipe. Your daughter gave me a jar, it tasted delicious and I asked for the recipe when I'd finished the jar because we'd all fought over the last spoonful.

You live 200 miles away and you have refused to give out the recipe.

It's an outrage.

Goose fat is phenomenally expensive though, MrsSchadenfreude, while lard is less than 50p for half a pound.

hmmm... might have to try the EveDallas variation on bread pud

Just as long as there is lard in it!

YY Jux

Goose fat was too good for cooking.

It was for spreading on chests to treat pneumonia/bronchitis/similar

A credit from Nigella is basically a short cut to selling more of your own (mentioned) book so it is a generous act in itself. But Nigella also credits people who send her recipes, who are not famous. She is very good like that. Most of the recipes she cites from others have been adapted by herself- I sometimes go seek out the original and there is always a difference between the two, they do not appear to be facsimiles.

I have that Richard Sax book too - it is great.

Oh god, I got a new cooker the other day. It's an ikea one...... EVERYTHING tastes different in it. It seems to cook by forced steam, rather than heat, and everything goes in much lower. It's just too fancy for me. (I like a hot spot in an oven!)

I'm going to have to reinvent all my recipies, and I have some collection of secret ones!! har har.

Thing is I got a new hob - induction, and it's driving me nuts too! Had to get a new pot as my old reliable chilli pot doesn't work!!!

A friend and his family raved about his wifes pulled pork on FB and I asked how she did it..I got a coy er marinated for 48 hours then cooked blah blah...like it was some state secret.

Its not a nice trait

this thread is absolutely hysterical and brilliant.

Can't believe people wouldn't hand out a recipe, and keeping them SECRET? I mean why would you? I see no decent explanation apart from weird family tradition.

Business is different I guess, Lea and Perrins never let the recipe out do they?

There is absolutely no "moral obligation" to share recipes...

If someone wants to, as a favour then that is fine and you can (and should) be suitably grateful After all, they are going to the trouble of finding and copying it for you.

I am normally very generous about giving out recipes - but I don't feel any moral obligation to do so. But having said that, many of my recipes are handwritten copies of handwritten copies of my mother's (or other friends). Am I "morally obliged" to copy them just because someone asks for it?

One of my most treasured recipes is for tablet. I do share the photocopy of my mum's recipe, onto which I have superimposed my own notes from the 13 batches it took me until I could make it consistently. I only share it with friends though - and even they struggle to make it as consistently as I do all my friends say that I make the best tablet that they have ever had

I lurrrve tablet but cannot make it

I'm going to attempt a bread pudding recipe - a mix of Bore's and Eve's, with some added marmalade (from my Mum's) and see how it turns out

Shopping List:
Lard

I do have a lovely chocolate cake recipe given to me by an American friend. It contains lard!!

Now, I don't normally like chocolate cake, (or anything chocolatey-flavoured), but this is really quite delicious. I'll hunt it down and type it out for all MN "friends".

(Prettybird - you will not be allowed to read it, unless you share your tablet recipe) Heeheehee

No lard : just a quarter of a pound of butter, a can of condensed milk, 2lb of sugar and a cup of milk and a shedload of calories

All the recipes have pretty much the same proportions - it's the detail of the technique that makes the difference.

I have my mother's handwritten recipes. I love sharing them. Makes me happy to think of people eating the food I grew up eating.

My sister produced a tray bake choc fudge cake on a picnic in the summer and extolled lengthily on how she should have added a little more choc powder to the icing, and how her dp had eaten some of the mini choc balls whilst she made it etc.

It was airy, and light, and really unlike a lit of the cakes she usually makes so i asked her for the recipe to which i initially received silence and then 'oh i can't give it you, i do it on taste alone'.

BULLSHIT SIS. You bought the fucker from Tesco for a fiver and we all bloody knew it!

Sooo prettybird, about this technique...?

I agree mother inferior. I like to think people are eating 'my' food and enjoying it (and it being healthy for them).

Thing is, that most of my recipies are "a pinch of this", and "enough of that", and now I have a new cooker, I'm lost as there were patches in my old one where I knew the thing would cook at X temp for Y time and be perfect.
I feel like I'm starting all over, as I realise I cook by feel, not be recipie as such.

As for fudge tablets!! Umm, I've learnt never make it when it's raining, and stir it like crazy.... and still most times it's gooey. Tips please tablet masters

EvansOvalPiesYumYum I'll be interested to hear how your bread pud turns out!

Be aware that, while the top should be crusty, the inside should be almost jelly-like in consistency. That's the tricky bit.

The women in DH family are having a secret, silent war over his grandmother's recipe book. It's hilarious. SIL has it. But can't read it as it's in another language. She refuses to give it to her aunt (DIL of the grandmother) as the aunt is not directly related and she doesn't believe she'll ever get it back.

I know this because I get told as an interested and involved, but non-threatening, outsider. But NONE of them speak to each other about it and in fact, it's not clear to me if everyone else knows that SIL has the full book.

The funniest part is that DH COULD read it. But SIL won't give it to him. I think secretly she's worried I will steal the recipes!

Bore, I ended up making a Bread Pudding yesterday, and I've had 3 rather large pieces already. Sadly DD has been home sick since Tue and can't partake...

I've discovered that the lard version doesn't taste as 'suet-y' when cold, but I prefer the suet version when warm. Hmm. Time for a NC I think - Bread 'Pudding' (made with suet and served with custard), Bread 'Cake' (made with lard and served with a cup of tea).

Are you sure you used enough lard Eve?

WorkingBling - could he not offer to translate it for her, next time you visit them? there can't be that many recipes in one granny book!

Redefined - he has. She's still suspicious. It's very amusing.

Kind of sad though as the other thing they all go on about is how fabulous her recipes were. They're from another country and apparently they're all super traditional and authentic, handed down for generations etc...

Shame no one will ever get to use those apparently wonderful recipes, given your SIL can't read them and won't let anyone else near them.

What kind of twisted logic do you have to employ to decide it's better that no one gets something if they alternative is sharing it with someone else? Especially when it's sharing knowledge, so someone else's share will no diminish your own. Just baffling really.

I always remember as a child going to visit some very posh friends my parents had made. They made a lasagne which was amazing - I think it was the first time of tasted herbs and my overwhelming memory is herby (maybe thyme?)

Anyway, they wouldn't share the recipe. I do think of that lasagne. If he had shared the recipe, I would have always thought fondly of them and I would have had that memory of them making that for us and introducing us to herbs. Now the memory is of nice food but people that were a bit meh.

Here's the OP of a thread of mine from last year, when I gave my SIL a recipe of a dish I had made for her. Suffice to say, it's the last recipe I shared with her!

Arghhh!

We have DH's sister and family over for lunch or dinner about 4 times a year. I've been DH's partner/wife for 17 years, and have done all the cooking and cleaning up afterwards for all of these gatherings. We have never been to SILs house, apart from to drop off presents. I'm such a good cook that she'd be embarrassed to cook for me, and it's so easy for me- I just throw it all together (Ahem, the 17 years of practice helped, FYI)

So, on their last outing, I made a crab pasta. It went down very well. It went beautifully with the wine they didn't bring.

A few weeks pass, and last Thursday SIL phones, asking for the recipe, wanting to make it on the Friday night, for some friends. Where can she get the same crab? I suggest she uses tinned crab but that won't do. I'm persuaded (brass neck) to get some crab claws from my fish guy, cook them, prepare the meat, and drop it to her house. Because she's a teacher and I'm a SAHM (privileged and spoiled).

I do this, drop them round to her house, and since it's not being offered, ask for payment for the crab claws. She actually blushed, and asked me what I meant? She thought I knew a bloke who always gave me fish! Eh? We ( DH & I) had always refer to him by name apparently, and this made him sound like a friend.

No! I live inland, I don't go out to work, where the uttering FUCK would I meet a fisherman who gives away free fish????

So, I wished her well for her dinner party, checked she didn't have any questions about the detailed recipe and instructions I had written out for her, and went on my way. I didn't hear from her, and nor did I expect to.

Today, DH called to her to collect some of our gardening stuff (again)(a whole other thread), and he asked how the dinner party went. Not too well. The recipe wasn't too clear, apparently.

She had the crab, she had the pasta, the creme fraiche, the parsley, the chilli but she forgot the lemon juice.

So she used lemonade.

And it tasted rank.

And the recipe never said NOT to use lemonade.

And DH finally told his beloved sister that she is "a fucking muppet"

I just had to share!