Large Family Idiosyncrasies #8: Kitchen Math

Did you know that if you multiply 2 teaspoons by 6 it equals a quarter of a cup?
Have you ever tried to count 20+ cups of flour without losing track?
Can your largest pot hold more than 4 gallons of water?
Would your freezer fit half a cow, plus 40 lbs of chicken thighs, and several gallons of ice-cream?

For a big family, this is normal "survival" mode in the kitchen. We have to make a lot of food, every day, just to keep the kids fat and friendly, and at the same time we can't neglect the household, or teaching school. It's a like a weird cross between running a restaurant and a family: without the equipment to make industrial-sized batches of food, yet stretching the capacity of our home-style tools every day.

All of our recipes have been doubled at least once over the years, often multiple times, and our cookbooks are full of marginal notations, such as "can be tripled" "make in two separate batches"
"x6" (that one's for pancake batter) "makes enough for our family + 2 guests if doubled if tripled" . As a result of all these adaptations, we often cannot remember the original portion number, and multiplying by two or three as we put together a meal is done subconsciously. This causes trouble when a recipe is started as written (8 cups of flour, say, or 3 lbs of ground beef), but then part way through adding the ingredients things start being doubled—we might end up with twice as much salt, or baking soda, or cayenne pepper as we intended! The result may be more-or-less edible, depending on the nature of the menu, and what ingredients were involved.

However, when we're making up that much food at a time, we can't afford to throw it away, so we usually manage to choke it down somehow. Now, with adult kids in the house, the "everyone eats the same thing, eat everything on your plate" rule is less stringent, but we have always had one exception: there are certain foods that Dad doesn't like, and if he won't eat something, it is optional for the kids too! This includes coconut, squash, cream-of-anything soup (and also anything labeled "casserole"), but most especially Green Beans. He has a special face he makes for Green Beans, when the cook isn't looking, much to his children's delight.

Because of this violent distaste for green beans at the top of the totem-pole, Mom doesn't buy them. This does not mean that they never enter the house, though. In our congregation, there is a slight remnant of the "pay-your-pastor-with-garden-produce" mentality, so throughout the summer and fall people drop off all sorts of food at our house: five-gallon pails filled with grapes, bags and bags of rhubarb (what can you really do with rhubarb, anyway?), walnuts (still in their shells, us kids have to crack the shells and pick out the meat), green beans (inevitably), frozen turkeys, fish, venison, and once a can of slug chowder. "Never say 'No' to free food" is another rule at our house, and we generally manage to put what people give us to good use: steaming, blanching, freezing, canning, pickling, and drying it as the case may require.

All this mass food production left me strangely ill-prepared to cook for two people, although I did adjust quickly. Now, instead of multiplying every recipe, I simply divide! To make pizza, for instance, I cut our family's crust recipe to one-sixth, and then use one half of the resulting dough, freezing the other half.

Kitchen math—it's real; use it as an example next time a fifth grader asks how mathematics applies to the real world.