I think growing up my family’s recipe for them was just like meat, salt, pepper, onions (but not enough), and breadcrumbs. Admittedly it was probably one of the best dishes they would make, up there with saffron rolls, but in retrospect it was just like bland kofta. I will say that the swedish dishes they’d make tended to be better than the generic American ones they’d do, which were inevitably mediocre to start with and then also cooked wrong without any attempt to fix or refine them.
Ugh. American food. Mushy casseroles, inedible, brick like meatloaf, badly cooked chicken, burnt, cracker-dry grilled hamburgers, potato salads in which the key ingredient is salmonella, deviled eggs with just enough flavorless paprika to turn them reddish, dry, fiberous turkey stuffed with mushy bread, and god awful desserts that combine like three different kinds of mushy sugar.
Yeah. A lot of underseasoned and overcooked meat too. Some of it’s even stuff that can be good when prepared properly (like burgers can be great when seasoned and shaped properly so they’re not just a bulging blob of charred unseasoned meat), but it seems like most people just fundamentally lack the ability to learn and improve upon recipes and instead just sort of throw food vaguely in the direction of heat and eat whatever comes of it.
So it’s not surprising that dishes my family grew up eating and learned organically from their culture were consistently better than like recipes clipped from a magazine or half remembered from watching a cooking show.
