That still doesn’t answer the question **CairoCarol **posed. If she finally perfected a recipe, and was able to reproduce it every time, why couldn’t she tell her daughter how she did it? After she found the right way, she was doing the same thing over and over.
IIRC, the group at America’s Test Kitchen/Cook’s Illustrated say this doesn’t work. I don’t know of a way to undo too much salt.
The only way is to make another batch without any salt and marry the two. If you are talking about a liquid based dish, that is.
True, that would work for broth and similar things; mashed potatoes/other foods would be all right too. The OP would probably still be stuck as I suspect you’d have a pot of beans which are individually very salty or very bland. 
Simple solution : Take one salty bean and one bland bean. Place on plate. Mash together. Eat. Enjoy. Repeat as necessary.
Probably because she cooked it by feel and experience. Not, “Three cups of flour” but “Start with some flour, and if it’s not enough add more until it’s right.”
My SO does all of the cooking. And yes, generally, unless the food is RUINED (which has happened maybe three times in our eleven years together) I probably won’t say anything. I am so grateful to have found a man who will do the cooking that it seems rude to criticize.
He has complained about this before. “Tell me if it needs more salt!” And I try to be honest, but really, if I ever had to cook for us I’d go batshit insane, so I try never to complain.
I’m guessing that’s it, too. My gran tried to teach me to make biscuits, but she did it by “feel” so I had to figure it out for myself.
OK, ‘Splain somthin’ to me please.
There’s talk in this thread of ruining a meal past the point of edibility. Never had that happen in my whole life. I’ve gone through one mom, two wives and several girlfriends and have never had a meal that wasn’t edible. I’ve cooked and continue to cook plenty and have never ruined a meal myself. I also don’t recall anyone I’ve lived with having to start over or call for takeout.
I usually cook by sight and smell and I try new stuff all the time but have never ruined a meal. How does it happen? What ruins a meal?
Lots of ways.
Utterly overcooking something - I think I’ve told this before but I had a recipe for twice-cooked pork (bite-sized pieces of meat fried in oil, allowed to cool, then fried again… oil too hot, resulting in lumps that were black all the way through - had to use elbow grease to even cut one, forget chewing it!).
An utterly wrong ingredient (a woman I worked with years ago - native of another country, which is relevant: she didn’t understand a recipe for poundcake, so tried substituting. Yeast is not a good substitute for baking powder).
FAR TOO MUCH of a desired ingredient such as the salty beans.
Missing a step or doing one out of order. My older brother once (recently) messed up Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. No joke. Turns out you’re not supposed to add the orange powder to the boiling water.
IIRC, the only meal I’ve ever made that was literally inedible was the pork. Most times, following the recipe instructions will yield an edible, if not delicious, result. And when improvising, a certain amount of experience will guide you away from true disasters.
Have you ever heard of the book, I think it’s called “The Languages of Love”, or something like that? Basically, we all have one way in which we feel best communicating, “I love you” and we have one way in which we best hear someone else communicating “I love you” to us. The ways may or may not be identical.
For some people, the best way they know to say, “I love you” is by cooking. I’m one of them. I love to cook, and I love it when people eat my food. In fact, the more people I love that I’m cooking for, the less I eat. I’m indescribably happy when someone else likes my food. And I’m crushed when the food doesn’t turn out right or it’s not to someone’s taste because it’s not my food they’re rejecting - it’s my love. It’s me.
As I’ve become more aware of this pattern, I’m trying to get over it, but it’s deeply ingrained, and I know that even when my husband or my son (who are now aware of this method of communicating my love) gently reject food, even silently, I’m a little crushed.
My guess is that either your roommate is like this OR someone else important to her boyfriend, like his mother, is like this. He knows that for some people, criticizing their food is an emotional landmine, even if that’s intellectually stupid.
These stories literally have me teary with love-joy.
My fiancee and I have no problem pointing out and laughing at our culinary gaffes, and in all cases it’s fuly understood that we are laughing with each other about a failed experiment rather than at the one responsible for the dinner disaster.
Over the weekend, I tried to make a Latin American soup. We went to market known for its ethnic food diversity to get an ingredient only found there. Oh, and we needed a small can of green chilis. NOT jalapenos or anything really hot, just the kind of green chilis you’d get in a mild green salsa. Due to the language barrier, what ended up in the soup was fire-hot-like-eating-crushed-glass-with-lemon-juice chilis.
On her first sip of soup, my girlfriend said “Wow! This has some zing!” after a few more bites, I started to fear for my bunghole. This food was burning going in, and it was destined to burn the balloon knot on the way out. It was too damn hot! There was no way in hell I’d have expected her to choke that back and you’d have to have guts of steel not to point out the tragic chili error. I have made this soup before, and this was NOT the way it was supposed to be.
We dumped the soup through a strainer and picked out the chilis. I re-made the broth and we put the veggies back into it. It won’t be as nice and flavourful, since the broth wasn’t cooked with the veggies, but the taste is closer to the way it’s supposed to be.
I certainly didn’t take my fiancee’s feedback as criticism. We’re partners in life, so Disaster Soup is our adventure.
ETA: And yes, it felt like flames on exit.
There are plenty of other ways to mess food up as well. 
Spoiled ingredient that’s vital - milk’s gone sour, you discover weevils in the flour/grain/whatever, etc.
Slightly wrong ingredient - I had a stirfry that asked for firm tofu to be added directly to the stirfry. I used the kind from the “juice box” (aseptic) packaging, rather than the “tub of water” packaging; at the time (over 15 years ago!) I didn’t know the latter existed, and the cookbook didn’t specify. Anyone who’s tried both will know that even “extra firm” tofu from the aseptic packaging is actually really mushy. We hated the texture it brought to the dish.
Kitchen accident - I spilled the lovingly-prepared homemade curry all over myself. Time to call for carryout; at that point I was frustrated and needed to act quickly to try to get that staining stuff out of my clothing (and was not successful in the end), and did not want to take the time to remake the meal while I was dealing with cleanup.
I rarely, if ever, say anything less than complimentary about anyone else’s cooking - and definitely not before they say something themselves. I find cooking to be a real chore, so I’m always really grateful when someone else did it, even if it’s not to my taste. By the same token, I’d get annoyed if someone said something to me (unless it was truly inedible) - I’d most likely be thinking, “if that’s the way you feel, you can do the bloody cooking next time.”
Yes, that is exactly the situation in the OP. One day she made beans and they were great. When she made beans again they were inedible and not at all like the previous occasion. So one would expect the guy to pipe up and say something, even if it was jut “This is really different than the last time you made it.”
What would be the point, though? She’s going to try it herself and realize, sooner or later. Again, if it were me, I’d have no problem admitting I screwed up, I just don’t appreciate someone else pointing it out to me first when I’ve made an effort on their behalf. I think staying quiet and keeping your head down is the more tactful way to handle the situation.
I once ruined a batch of cookies by adding too much baking soda. You probably don’t want to know how I proceeded to un-ruin them.
As to the OP, I probably would have said something like “Honey, this tastes different from last night. Did you make them the same way?”. This leaves room for a gracious “No, it’s not bad, just different” if it looks like the cook’s feelings will be hurt, or “It’s OK, but I think I liked them better last night”, but also opens up the possibility of constructive criticism of what went wrong, and figuring out what to do about it, if she’s open to that sort of thing.
That assumes she realizes she screwed up and it’s not just “a matter of taste”. How long are you supposed to keep gnoshing away while you wait for someone to realize the chicken is raw at the center?
That is a lovely story.
I love this story!