Like a true moron, one of the first things I do each morning is glance at Facebook. I’ll sit there with my coffee and give it a little going over. I sometimes wonder if this is good for my mental health. There’s maybe only 20% of the things I see that I care about while the other 80% is mostly blabber from people I haven’t spoken to since high school. Right now it’s a glut of posts about going back to school.
Yet, mixed in with all the usual nonsense I’ve noticed that more and more people tend to share recipes these days. You’ve no doubt seen one of these posts. It’s just a photo of the finished food with either a link or a write-up of the recipe. They all have some sort of chatter attached to them like “Ah! This is one of the true classic soups!” Sometimes they go for a more homespun approach with “Grandpa used to make these for us every Sunday and I’ve not seen them since.”
I doubt that many of these recipes that make such claims are authentic “Pee Paw” material. Why? As 90% of them are just things on slider buns. I don’t know exactly when the humble slider overtook American kitchens as a trend, but I know it was only in the last decade or so. You click the link or follow the recipe and it’s just a sloppy Joe, on a slider bun! Shredded chicken cooked in French onion soup mix, on a slider bun!
I’m not knocking these things, mind you. It’s just that after a while the proliferation of slider bun-centric recipes on Facebook all start to look the same and it confuses me. I want to see this trend be carried to the extreme of the foodie scale. Let’s see them work Molecular Gastronomy into the mix. I want to see clickbait-type posts for “brie cheese foam the way grandma used to make it!”
I wonder where the source of many of these recipes comes from? They have so many old-church cookbooks of the late 1980s terminology that I can’t help but wonder if many of these clicky, buzzy-sounding food pages just copy and paste out of yard sale finds. The 29th food post from “Real Food For Your Family” has a lot of recipes centered around cans of soup and dry ranch dressing mix.
Again, I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, it just seems oddly out of trend for a lot of the modern food views that are so popular on, say, YouTube. I don’t recall the last time Claire Saffitz, queen of the kitchen, told me to crack open a can of soup during one of her videos. If we want to get terrified by a soup can cuisine, I’d like to see a post about the time that Campbell’s tried to convince people to make cocktails and chilled pre-dinner drinks with cans of soup.
I can picture it now. A post shared by some older relation that you don’t speak to because of political reasons. The post is from “True Classic Kitchens Now.” “Remember when you’d spend the weekends at your grandparent’s house and grandpa would come in from the farm work he spent all day doing and drink a classic ‘Campbell’s Settler?’ Well, we can’t wait to share that feeling with you again with our take on the classic drink.”
Sure, a vaguely alcoholic drink that looks opaque yellow sounds mighty temping after a long, hard day at work. Then you look at the ingredients and it’s a mix of brandy, half & half, chilled vodka, and half a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. It’ll settle you alright, but to where I can not dare to fathom. There must be a market I am missing out on here, maybe it’s time I looked into making my clickbait-style food page on Facebook?
“Andy’s Weeknight Tattler Meals?” Something that will get lots of shares, lots of likes, and is loaded to the gills with sodium. I better get to work on this right away. It’s been a while since I’ve explored the wonders of condensed soup anyways. See you next week.