The news the other week that Colonel Sanders's original recipe book had been found in a vault by a KFC employee reminded me just how much the world (and especially an advertising department) loves a secret recipe. Yet, in line with the openness internet users are accustomed to, the company says it plans to make most of the home-cooking recipes contained within available online.
The key recipes, however, including the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices that made the chain what it is, are to remain safely under lock and key. This is a situation familiar to me as, without wanting to be disowned, my maternal line has a venerable history of keeping schtum on recipes. As a cook, what can you do if the recipe you want is held by a recipe-hogger?
My mother used to make a very Abigail's Party-type dessert of fruit cocktail in a mysterious creamy syrup that had a sweet, grainy quality to it that I couldn't quite place. She wouldn't tell me what was in it and expected me to guess. She would only concede that the recipe wasn't hers but that of a mysterious Sikh lady she once knew, a "Mrs Singh", apparently, who might have lived in Southall.
Eventually, after persistent pestering, she came clean: a common or garden swiss roll would be blended into carnation milk to make the yummy yet unidentifiable sweet sauce. Her reason for keeping it quiet was not to stop others making it but because "people can be so snobby about some ingredients".
My maternal great-uncle was another secretive cook and very protective of the recipe for his seekh kebab spice mix. Eventually one of his nieces, a particularly clever aunt of mine, asked him to make the kebabs at her house as a special favour to her. She reasonably assumed when he asked her for various spices, his recipe would be revealed. He turned up in the morning to marinate the meat with a pouch of his spices, pre-ground and pre-mixed, scuppering her plan completely. He took the recipe with him when he died a few years back.
For the hack of it
Outside family circles, there are people who make a career out of deciphering recipes. In America, self-styled "food hacker" Todd Wilbur has a TV show in which he investigates and reveals the recipe for famous fast foods such as KFC chicken or Sara Lee cheesecake. Many amateurs play this game too; my best friend Raj says he cracked the KFC fried-chicken recipe to make a healthier baked version for his family (it took him several weeks and a lot of revolting chicken was made in the process). Gary, my boyfriend, makes his own version of Chicken McNuggets with shaped pieces of fresh chicken breast and a spiced flour mix that is a complete mystery to me. I'm not a big fan of the McDonald's version so I'm not desperate to decode that recipe, but Tim Hayward's efforts in formulating his better-than-KFC fried chicken are definitely to be applauded.
It's not just fast-food recipes that are under continual investigation. When El Bulli closed its doors this summer, a restaurant in Ottawa raked in the cash with a tribute dinner that recreated the restaurant's most famous dishes.
The controversy that resulted was similar to another row some years back when Melbourne's Interlude restaurant had a number of un-credited dishes from a famous, still open, New York restaurant on its menu. But aside from the ethical dilemma involved in such "tribute" menus surely you have to admire the skill of a chef who can figure out a recipe from tasting it alone?
But if you don't have the sort of palate that can decipher a recipe from taste and texture alone, what can you do?
The secret recipe I would be most likely to consider doing something rash to obtain is for my friend George's spiced pigeon pie. There are plenty of recipes out there for pigeon pie but somehow none of them turn out as delicious as George's. What is his secret? He admits he has added his own touch to a recipe from an old cookbook. Finding out what that enigmatic touch is might require me to get heavy with him.
