A couple secret-recipe idiosyncrasies are legend among those handed down in my family. For example, wherever grandma's recipes say "a spoon of sugar", she was actually using a ladle.
There's a recipe my mom got from a friend of my grandmother - that friend had to actually make the cookies to figure out the recipe, because the whole thing was phrased in terms of a green bowl full of flour and a blue bowl full of sugar and of course my mom didn't have the same bowls my grandmother's friend did.
