Recipe Inflation?
Discussions about the obesity epidemic inevitably focus on commercial products, either processed foods from the grocery store, or fast food/restaurant offerings. Since the frequency of home-cooked, “slow food” meals is at an all-time low, “homemade” food has more-or-less gotten a pass.
But home-cooked meals have evidently gotten bigger/richer over time, too…
Restaurants get a bad rap for serving gargantuan portions of food and contributing to Americans’ expanding waistlines. But what if something in your home were equally guilty? Something as innocent as . . . “Joy of Cooking”?
The classic cookbook, first published in 1931, has done some girth-expanding of its own, a study has found.
Published as a letter Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the report examined 18 classic recipes found in seven editions of the book from 1936 to 2006. It found that calorie counts for 14 of the recipes have ballooned by an average of 928 calories, or 44%, per recipe. And serving sizes have grown as well.
Take beef stroganoff: In the 1997 edition, the recipe called for three tablespoons of sour cream. The 2006 edition calls for one cup.
Then there’s waffles: In 1997, the basic recipe made 12 six-inch waffles; in 2006, the same ingredients made about six waffles.
LOL – I have a “Joy of Cooking” on my bookshelf too…it’s probably about 20 years old. But even when I first bought it, I noticed how rich/fatty many of the recipes were. I would not have guessed, however, that the recipes evolved in that direction from leaner antecedents. Interesting…
Needless to state, I do most of my recipe trawling on the internet these days, but invariably stick to either “Lite” recipes, or ones I can successfully adapt to my preferences.
