Avrom Honig is 26 and not afraid to admit he’s a mama’s boy. Make that grandmama’s boy.
He’s salivated over his bubbe’s (Yiddish for grandmother) food since he was a kid. He remembers sneaking over to her house when he was 7 to have her signature sponge cake with cream and strawberries. Her matzo ball soup is apparently life-changing. And don’t even get him started on her sweet and sour meatballs.
For decades, it was impossible for anyone to replicate her cooking, since her recipes existed only in her memory. But Mr. Honig, who runs a Web video production company in the Boston area, coaxed his grandmother to convert those rough measurements to metric ones and share her kosher specialties with the world through the online video series Feed Me Bubbe. Thousands have viewed and read her tutorials. They’re even making Bubbe’s chicken schnitzel in China, it seems.
While cherished family recipes were once closely guarded secrets, passed down orally to blood relatives, the Internet has overturned tradition. Appreciative grandchildren, such as Mr. Honig, are persuading their grandmothers to reveal their signature recipes for gumbo, pho and chicken tetrazzini online, in part to share the wealth, but also to give readers and viewers a more “authentic” meal.
Nathalie Cooke, editor of What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History and associate dean of arts at McGill University in Montreal, says that in an age when a simple Google search for any recipe can yield a few thousand hits, home cooks are starved for guaranteed successes.
“You need somebody to be held accountable – it has to be the author,” she says.
Recipes should have three elements, she explains: ingredients, method and handover. But many Internet recipes lack that crucial third element, which acts as an introductory note to contextualize and add personality to the recipe.
Grandmothers have a knack for nailing that part.
In the popular YouTube series Depression Cooking with Clara, 94-year-old Clara Cannucciari prepares cheap meals from the Great Depression while sharing personal tales with her viewers.
“I had to quit high school because we couldn’t afford socks – we couldn’t afford anything to wear. But we survived,” she muses on camera while peeling potatoes for her signature dish: Poorman’s Meal, a bizarre but apparently tasty medley of potatoes, onions, pasta sauce and hot dogs (“because they were cheaper”).
In her dandelion salad recipe (“they’re cheap – you can get ’em for nothing”), she says, “Once we had quail. Somebody must’ve shot it and it fell in our yard...My dad said, ‘It fell in my yard, so it’s my property.’ So my mother cooked it. It was very good.”
Even when times got more prosperous, Ms. Cannucciari continued making budget-friendly dishes such as egg drop soup, which her children happily scarfed down.
“They were nourishing, they were good, they taste good,” she explains in an interview from her home in upstate New York. “You get used to them and you wish for them.”
When her grandson Chris pitched the idea of a video series to her, she was hesitant. “I thought, ‘I make such miserable meals, why are you going to put it on TV?’ ” she says.
But he convinced her that her best-loved dishes were too delicious to keep to herself, an idea that runs counter to the long-standing tradition of protecting family recipes.
“Quite often, those recipes aren’t shared because it’s a way of adding particular value to an occasion or event to bring [a dish] like that,” Ms. Cooke explains.
To outsiders, the added value comes in the form of back stories and characters that round out the cooking experience, she says. But interestingly, it can sometimes be even more appealing when identifying details are left out, because it makes the recipe’s author larger than life.
