I don't understand the people who say, "That recipe is a family
secret." Unless you are planning to use them to open a mediocre food
franchise like KFC then by all means pass along those recipes to
anyone who will listen.
I have always felt sharing recipes is a path to a form of
immortality. If someone continues to use, share or improve your
recipe then a part of you continues to live on. One of my wife's
favorite possessions is a card file of old, discolored, food stained
recipes her mother used. She created a family cook book with many of
those recipes and included color reproductions of the stained cards
in the file with her mother's handwriting and her notes that often
said, "Cook until done." Hardly a day goes by without using some
tool, recipe, or philosophy her mother left to us.
My own mother's recipes are best left alone as her interests were
more in literature, religion, and community service.
My wife tells the story of a neighbor who each year brought to the
annual ice cream social a batch of heavenly lemon chiffon ice
cream. When my wife at age 12 asked if she could have the recipe,
she was rebuffed with the, "that is a secret family recipe"
line. Then and there my wife decided she would share any recipe she
had with anyone who would ask. It has always been my theory that the
neighbor bought the ice cream and repackaged it for the social (my
wife says that isn't the case).
So the moral of my story is share and teach. It will help you live
forever. I taught juggling for several years and told each student
that they needed to teach someone to juggle too. I hoped that
eventually my teaching technique would get passed along and I too
could live forever through juggling.
JD Miller
Tumwater WA