Back-of-the-box recipes were once the stuff of family lore, and they can still be a source of inspiration now
But the passionate devotion to back-of-the-box recipes trails off once we reach the digital age. Back-of-the-box recipes, while once omnipresent, have fallen out of favor. We still rely on grocery stores and basic pantry ingredients, of course, but the recipes we use now become reliable go-tos or part of family lore for different reasons. We see food through the lens of the internet, where inertia and zeitgeist point us to compelling still lifes and their accompanying recipes.
Arguably, we’ve moved past analog pantry cooking for other reasons, too. Our culinary world is different. It’s fresher and more market-dependent than it was in the industrial era. “Something that’s different today is that we have incredible access to an incredible abundance of ingredients,” Wassberg Johnson says. In some ways, cooking today is fly-by-night, with ingredients dictating meals.
But if back-of-the-box recipes were birthed as a marketing ploy that is, on its face, purely American, their evolution was American, too. They became solution-based remedies, pantry vignettes, short stories to get us through the repetition of mealtime. And then they became woven into our history, before we aspired to be better cooks who used better ingredients. Today, faced with less, and not more, the dilemma of how to cook lies with us.
Cooking doesn’t need to be complicated to be valuable. There’s value in opening your pantry, reading the box, and doing what it says. In the process, pay homage to the home economists who built the empires of test kitchens, the ones who worked behind the scenes to create things we didn’t know were possible.
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