During the previous round of shirkflation I warned people about knowing what year a recipe was from because “a can” means something different in 2004 than in 2010. And now it means something different again in 2025.
Now boxes are getting the shrink treatment too.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/618032
What happened to grandmothers cooking and baking from normal ingredients, using handwritten recipes collected on papers randomly stuck into an old cook book?
Well…
World War 1 happened. there was rationing.
Then the 20’s happened and grandmothers disappear from the historical record, they either became flappers or were shot to death with a Thompson submachine gun in a speakeasy. RIP roaring 20’s grandmas.
Then the Great Depression happened and the only foodstuffs that existed were peanut butter and saltine crackers.
Then World War 2 happened, there was rationing again.
Rationing ended in 1947, and basically everything in America changes. GI’s returning from war 1. fuck the fucking fuck out of the women, resulting in more pregnancies than Earth had ever seen before. There’s a housing boom, they skin the continent of old growth pine to build suburbs, with adjacent business districts full of supermarkets complete with large parking lots for the family car. These supermarkets are full of mass manufactured packaged food, some of which use technologies developed for military rations. We enter the era of the boxed cake mix, the canned cake icing, and the frozen TV dinner. All of this is new and exciting, and the marketing poses industrial made foods such as shortening as more scientific and purified than natural food.
I got this from a comment under a Youtube video, responding to why Jello was so popular in the 1960’s: Because a gelatin mold was seen as an impressive feat of housewifery. Much earlier than 1960 and gelatin is a pain in the ass to make but now that it’s a commercial product that comes in a box, you pour the packet into some hot water and stir and bam, it became quite a trend. The same happened with cake. Pour a box of powder in a bowl, dump in 2 cups of water, stir it a little and then pour into pans and bake. Betty Crocker had to take the egg powder back out of the mix because market research showed housewives felt underwhelmed, baking with all-in-one mix didn’t feel like enough of a project. So make them provide their own eggs I guess.
So the Greatest Generation, my grandparents, bake like that. Because all the hip keen 25 year olds are baking like this, MOM, I can make a whole cake in an hour, I’m icing while you’re still sifting that flour. That’s how they teach their boomer daughters how to bake, and the average boomer housewife is at a loss as to how to bake a cake without a box of Betty Crocker.
Gen X has never and will never exist.
Millennial women seem have a complicated relationship to baking. On the one hand, there’s an entire genre of television/Youtube about baking cakes aimed pretty much at millennial women. Find me a woman in her 30’s that doesn’t have a strongly formed opinion on fondant. That’s what they watch when they’re temporarily sick of True Crime. On the other hand, feminism’s distaste for women in the kitchen has lead to a lot of women having no discernible cooking skills. I’m a better cook than most of the women I’ve dated, and most of the women I’ve dated I wouldn’t trust to own a sifter or a rolling pin, particularly the city dwelling Democrat voters.
Gen Z? Like they’re ever going to live somewhere with an oven.
Grandma grew up in the 80s eating microwave dinners. She never learned to cook.
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That explains the recipe, yes.
Your grandma maybe
The average grandma. My grandma is 90 and grew up in a very different world.
If your Grandma is 90, she definitely didn’t grow up in the 80’s.
I said the average grandma because I was talking about the average instead of mine. Today an average grandma is someone who grew up in the '80s. This shouldn’t have gone on this long so I’m going to try to make this very clear. I was not talking about my grandmother. I’m talking about the average grandmother. The average grandmother grew up in a post kitchen era. They grew up as a latchkey kid in the '80s tossing things in the microwave. The vast majority of grandmas don’t know how to cook anymore.
Your average grandma is only 45 years old or less? Wow, popping out kids quick in that family. Hate to see the low end of this average