IT ALL STARTED WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN

DEAR FRIENDS,

I DO, WITH RECIPES, WHAT RICH LITTLE DOES WITH VOICES! Imitating the “Secret Recipes” of the food industry has been an exciting experience for me. The critics felt that “fast foods” and restaurant dishes were not worth the effort to duplicate at home, when you can just as easily buy the products already prepared!

The critics who contend that “fast foods” are “junk foods” and not good for us, have probably never prepared these foods themselves. Certainly, they have no access to the closely guarded recipes from the food companies that created these dishes, as there are only a few people in each operation that are permitted the privilege of such information! So, 99% of the critics’ speculations are based on their own opinions. To know what these dishes contained, they’d have to be better chemists than I, as I have tested over 20,000 recipes with only the finished product as my guide to determine what each contained. “Fast foods” are not “junk foods” unless they’re not properly prepared. Any food that is poorly prepared (and just as badly presented) is junk! Unfortunately, “fast food” has carried a reputation, by default, of containing ingredients that are “harmful” to us. Yet, they contain the same ingredients as those foods served in the “finer” restaurants with wine stewards, linen table cloths, candlelight, coat-check attendants, and parking valets; which separate the plastic palaces of “fast food” from the expensive dining establishments. One “eats” at McDonald’s, but “dines” at The Four Seasons. Steak and potato or hamburger and French fries – the ingredients are practically the same. How they are prepared makes the difference!

In the early 70s, I was trying to juggle marriage, motherhood, homemaking and a newspaper column syndicated through Columbia Features, when it seemed obvious to me that there wasn’t a single cookbook on the market that could help me take the monotony out of mealtime. There was not a single recipe in the newspaper’s food section that did not smack of down-home dullness! “Okay,” they said at the newspaper I worked for, “YOU write the column on foods and recipes that YOU think would really excite the readers and make them happy!” I did, but that didn’t make the Editors happy, because it made their [food industry] advertisers miserable. When I was told that I’d have to go back to monotonous meatloaf and uninteresting side-dishes that made mealtime a ritual rather than a celebration or “pick up my check”, I told them to “MAIL it to me!” I went home to start my own paper!

It was probably a dumb thing to do, amid an economic depression with the highest rate of unemployment I had ever experienced, but it was worth the risk. I was a dedicated writer that new someone had to give homemakers something more than what they were being given in the colored glossy magazines, where a bowl of library paste could even be photographed to look appetizing! There had to be more to mealtime than Lima beans and macaroni and cheese with Spam and parsley garnishes. There also had to be more to desserts than chocolate cake recipes that came right off the cocoa can. The food industry gave us more appealing products than did the cookbooks we trusted.

THEY LAUGHED! THEY DOUBTED! They even tried to take me to court when some famous food companies insisted that I stop giving away their secrets. They couldn’t believe me when I said that I did NOT know, nor did I want to know, what they put in their so-called secret recipes. I did know that there are very few recipes that can’t be duplicated or imitated at home. And we could do them for much less than purchasing the original product. I proved…it can be and should be done!

FAMOUS FOODS FROM FAMOUS PLACES have intrigued good cooks for a long time – even before fast foods of the 1950’s were a curiosity. When cookbooks offer us a sampling of good foods, they seldom devote themselves to the dishes of famous restaurants. There is speculation among the critics as to the virtues of re-creating, at home, the foods that you can buy “eating out”, such as the fast food fares of the popular franchise restaurants. To each, his own! Who would want to imitate “fast food” at home? I found that over a million people who saw me demonstrate replicating some famous fast food products on The Phil Donahue Show (July 7, 1981) DID – and their letters poured in at a rate of over 15,000 a day for months on end! And while I have investigated the recipes, dishes, and cooking techniques of “fine” dining rooms around the world, I received more requests from people who wanted to know how to make things like McDonald’s Special Sauce or General Foods Shake-N-Bake coating mix or White Castle’s hamburgers than I received for those things like Club 21’s Coq Au Vin.

A COOKBOOK SHOULD BE AS EXCITING AS A GOOD MYSTERY! Most are drably written by well-meaning cooks who might know how to put together a good dish, but know nothing about making the reader feel as if they’re right there, in the kitchen with them, peeling, cutting, chopping, stirring, sifting and all the other interesting things one does when preparing food. It is my intention in this book of the food industry’s “Secret Recipes”, to make you feel at home in my kitchen, just as if we’re preparing the dishes together…to later enjoy with those who share our tables with us.

THIS COOKBOOK IS NOT A BARGAIN BASEMENT COLLECTION! It is not a miss-mosh of recipes from here and there. It’s not at all like any other cookbook you will probably find, unless the publisher has used mine as a pattern – and a few have. But, it is nice to know that in having sold several hundred thousand copies of my monthly publication and my other 5 books, as well as the 10 or 15 books I did prior to “Secret Recipes” - that my readers have also been my friends.

I make a living with my writing – but, it’s my writing that makes living worthwhile!

Best wishes for great cooking adventures!

Gloria

WHAT THIS BOOK INCLUDES

Although I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been cooking, the notion to investigate the secrets of the food industry didn’t become a full-time labor-of-love until I was working for a small-town newspaper [about 1971.] As the only “married lady” on the staff, I was always assigned the food page and recipe column, and I was willing to try the dishes at home and present a column or article about their results to the paper. When you work for a small-town paper, you wear many hats. You set type, sell advertising, proof read, design headlines, create art work, campaign for subscribers; and, before you know it, you acquire skills you didn’t even know you possessed. The food department became such a welcomed relief from the local politics that I poured my heart and soul into it, learning some of the essentials of good cooking purely by default!

Everything went well until I initiated an idea to create advertising interest among local restaurants. It started when I answered a reader’s request in my column for a recipe like McDonald’s “Special Sauce”. I knew it was a kissin’ cousin of a good Thousand Island dressing, so the development of the recipe wasn’t difficult. The response from our readers was so appreciative that I contacted local restaurants for their advertising in exchange for my printing one of their recipes and menu in my column and a complimentary review of their place. No one was willing to part with any of their “secrets!” So, I decide to see if I could “guess” how they prepared their specialties of the house.

I came across a hotel in town that advertised “home-baked” cheesecake, and I felt they should be telling their customers “homemade.” The difference to the public is very slight, but they wanted the public to “think” it was homemade, from scratch, when it was, in fact, simply taken from a carton and popped into the oven like brown-and-serve rolls. That was before our “truth in menu” laws, but no one at the paper wanted to make an issue out of it. The restaurant insisted it was an old family recipe. I said the cheesecake smacked of commercial automation, stainless steel computerized kitchens and the family they referred to was probably that of Sara Lee! At any rate, that was when I parted company with the paper and set out on my own to create the “Secret Recipe Report,” which I dearly miss now.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

When you’re cooking, the recipe is not as important as the attitude of the cook. Good cooks are not born, but “shaped” through pure experience and a good memory. It’s one thing to be able to read and follow a recipe while you’re cooking – it’s quite another to follow a recipe and know instinctively if it will be good; or, at least, as good as you would like it to be! The only way you can achieve this kind of success in the kitchen is to taste your dish as you prepare it. You should always taste the food you’re preparing WHILE you’re preparing it, after you’ve added the last required ingredient and after each addition you make of your own and again just before you serve it. Even if you’re working with a truly dependable recipe, you may want to adjust it to fit your taste or that of whom you’re serving it to.

COOKBOOKS ARE APPARENTLY NOT ENOUGH to create a better standard for food preparation, any more than “The Bible” can create a moral atmosphere in the world. It’s more than reading the words and following the instructions, when we’re up to it. We need to put something of ourselves, our enthusiasm, into cooking as much as we do in our other activities. To be a good cook, you need to have a good attitude about what you’re preparing, how you want it to taste and what you want it to look like when you present it to those with whom you share your table. It takes more than a good recipe to make a good cook!

RECIPES ARE NOT INFALLABLE

No matter how the recipe may taste to the one who records it for publication, the chances of pleasing everyone with it are slim. Never be shy about making additions or flavor changes in a recipe. The only changes you shouldn’t make are those in proportions of ingredients in bake goods. When you work with baked goods, leavening and yeast, the ratio of leavening to shortening and starches (flour, etc.) are rather exact if the recipes have been tested prior to publishing. The cookbooks that admit the recipes were not tested, but, rather, collected from dubious sources may require some cautious experimenting on your part before you trust them to prepare for company.

The amount of shortening in such a recipe should also get your respect. To alter the amount of shortening, alone, in a recipe means that you also must alter the amounts of flour, eggs, etc.; so, do be cautious in this regard! However, the flavorings can be inter-changed with other flavorings. For example, if you want DIFFERENT flavors, you can use alternate extracts if the “amount” called for in the recipe is the same. The substitutions will have to be in accordance with the recipe requirements. If you want LESS flavor, use less extract and add water to equal the required “liquid amount.” If the balance of the liquid amount has not been compromised, then the result should be satisfying.

HI, NEIGHBOR!

BOB ALLISON’S “ASK YOUR NEIGHBOR”

One of the nicest things about being a writer is that you can work at home. Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, as soon as my kids were out the door to the school bus, I set up my $39.95 Smith Corona portable typewriter at the kitchen table, where I was one step away from the stove, refrigerator and recipes I was curious to test and write about. The view from the kitchen table included the front yard and the North Channel of the St. Clair River (part of the St. Lawrence Seaway to everyone else) – the river-side was the front yard and the road-side was the back yard. The old house had its faults, I’ll grant you, but nobody could refuse a view like we had, living on the banks of that river! There was always something going on outside, sufficient to inspire a feeling of well-being, which every writer must have to do their job well. In keeping with “write about what you know best”, I could put every economical recipe I used to feed my family of seven to good use, sharing the Secrets with others.

One of my addictions in those days was a daily recipe radio show called Ask Your Neighbor, hosted by Bob Allison over the WWJ-Detroit radio airwaves. He always opened his two-hour show by saying, “if you have a household problem you cannot solve, then call… (and he’d give a phone number) …and ask your neighbor!” I called him frequently with answers to his other listeners’ recipe questions, until I became “a regular” on the show. With Bob’s generous help in mentioning my monthly newsletter, my subscriptions began to climb to 300, and 400. I was finally showing a profit! That gave my husband, Paul, some relief from his skepticism that I would eventually outgrow my obsession with writing.

From Bob Allison’s listeners alone, Paul and I had received over 1000 letters in one day! When, 106 months later, we closed our subscriptions to the monthly newsletter, we were already serving over 15,000 subscribers and had probably returned subscription requests to over 10,000 people, because that’s when, like Dick and Mack McDonald, we decided that we did not want to “get big!” It is as much a thrill for me today, to hear somebody on Bob’s Ask Your Neighbor show request that “Gloria, The Secret Recipe Detective” try to duplicate a recipe, as it was for me decades ago when it all began.