Remember great aunt Judy's famouslemon bars? Yeah, those came from the back of a can of condensed milk. And mom'soatmeal raisin cookies? The ones you can't wait to bake for your own kids? Spoiler alert: it's the recipe from the back of the Quaker Oats canister.
Yes, kiddos, it turns out many of the family recipes that are passed along at reunions, potlucks, and book clubs have lived right under our noses in supermarkets across America.
And it's no wonder why they have such staying power. These recipes are easy to memorize, and because they have streamlined ingredient lists and instructions, they're even easier to execute.
The end products are America's taste touchstones—they've shaped our collective idea of what each of these desserts is supposed to taste like. In the Epicurious Test Kitchen, we often develop recipes that areriffs on originals, adding a little hint of this or splash of that to make them feel updated orunique. But that's because these back-of-the-box recipes already exist. All we can do is try (and sometimes fail) to improve upon them.
So, just for fun, we hit the grocery store aisles and picked up 20 old-faithful products with famous recipes on the labels. Then we baked (and tasted) them all. Some of them weren't as good as we remembered, but some of them were better. Here are our favorites, ranked from good to great:
