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Aspic, continued, or The Recipe's on the Box

Since my email appeal to Mom went unanswered, I called her. "Tomato shrimp aspic recipe, Mom! Help!" She chuckled and explained that it wasn't nearly as complicated as the recipe I outlined. "Honestly, it's V8, Knox, and a bit of lemon juice. My mother used to make it, and she passed it down to me, and I used to make it every year for your father's birthday. I added the shrimp myself." My pulse quickened when I heard that this is now a multi-generational recipe, handed down from my grandmother. Who knows how far this goes back? I could have a tasty link to my past cooling in my fridge! "Oh gosh, no," Mom interrupted. "The recipe was on the Knox box. Might still be." Thud. Well, so much for heritage. My visions of Beamont/Hanna/Hilton women lovingly crafting food from the fruits of the earth dissolved in to an image of women leading busy lives (Grandma dealing with rations and a World War, Mom working full time while raising children) and rejoicing in the new technology that allowed them to assemble somebody else's ingredients from a recipe printed on one of the boxes. It just seemed so fake. Absolutely sure that Knox gelatine no longer wasted ink on a recipe for tomato aspic, I turned to the web for answers. Sure enough, Knox Gel, now owned by Kraft Foods, has a recipe engine. Sure enough, Tomato Aspic is there, among the desserts, beverages, and side dishes, waiting to be assembled and spirited away to a potluck or church fundraiser. Then I gazed over at my own Bakespace icon, a yellow candy heart making sly reference to my own recipe for tiramisu made from Twinkies, and I realized the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Still, we don't really cook this way anymore. We've become Trader Joe's consumers. We cook in extremes, either creating from scratch using fresh, organic, fair trade ingredients, or we grab something table ready, but surely healthy and gourmet. The middle process of "convenience foods" has become a piece of the past. There are still recipes on boxes, in the form of URLs to corporate websites. But this means somebody is still brainstorming in a test kitchen to create "convenience" recipes for the way we cook now.