>It does make me wonder what marvelous skills have been lost to time because of secrecy or difficulty in recording the process.

It's okay. Sturgeon's law applies uniformly, so almost all of it is of no note whatsoever.

I wish I had your optimism about that still. Sturgeon's law is probably true, but I no longer believe that the best is recognized or preserved.

The way I see things now is some sort of corollary: Sturgeon was an optimist, and the percent of inferior things is so high it is difficult to find the things that are not. By extension, the best is likely to be lost.

Maybe that's a characteristic of our times though, and less true of the past.

That's why secret societies were born to protect the valuable 10% of skills that did work exceptionally well, and were hard to rediscover by on your own.

Eh, even my grandmother used to do absolutely delicious pumpkin empanadas that none of my aunts managed to replicate. Might be local flour, the way of cooking the pumpkin, unusual spices, specific dough fermentation, her stove, who knows?

She decided not to share the whole recipe, even if she likely learned it from her mother, probably because it was a source of income.