Cookaholics Bulletin Board

A relatively short discourse on how and why recipes are changing in format due to many influences:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/dining/written-recipes-undergo-a-makeover.html?hpw&rref=food&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Thanks for posting that, Bill, it was an interesting read. I'm definitely drawn to precise recipes, and although I enjoy a lot of the narrative in cookbooks, etc., it's not unusual for my eyes to glaze over after a few pages of it. So I'm with Jacques.

Emilie

The evolution of recipes has a long history. I have a number of collections from Apicus in Rome through Al-Andalus in 12th century Spain through the Elizabethan and Renaissance eras. Before standardized measurements cooking was very much a matter of experience and skill. "Cook it until it is done, then serve it forth" is a common instruction. Elizabeth David's classic on English bread and yeast baking is written in paragraphs of instruction with some measurements.
For pastry work, precision is more important than in most other cooking, and home baking improved across the board when measuring spoons and cups were standardized and recipes used them.
When I write a recipe I imagine that some prep cook has to make it because I have been hit by a bus. It has to produce the right result from someone who may never have made that kind of thing before. I leave out some shortcuts, I make sure the ingredients are listed in the order used, I try to make explanations simple and clear, but complete.
In a cookbook I want the same things, with pictures of complex items. I don't really care about the backstory of each item. The cookbook from the place that "invented" the cronut has some stupid comment about each recipe and they just sound obnoxious and pretentious to me.

That was an interesting article, and it hit upon many of the things I have noticed through my years of collecting cookbooks (and cooking, of course!). So many of those early books had countless recipes crammed into them, partly because the instructions were so vague, and figure that everyone knew how long to cook something, at what heat level, etc., etc. Then there is the other extreme we sometimes see, assuming everyone reading the book is just picking up a pan for the first time, and there are only 50 recipes in a 300 page book.

Like Becky, I am all for precise recipes, as a rule, partly due to much of my cooking being in the Asian cuisines, and many of these recipes have a large number of ingredients, which is sort of hard to wing it with, unless you are born into it, and have been doing it for a long time. It would be very easy to make a dish over-salty or over-spicy, just adding things at whim. And, like I tell people who say they never follow recipes, how do they repeat something, if they come up with something utterly fantastic? If you are making a recipe with 3 or 4 ingredients it may be easy to repeat, but not something with over 20!

I sort of agree with Jacques Pépin saying that somebody should make a recipe once or twice, exactly as is, before starting to tweak it. How do we know if we have just found a perfect recipe for something? Of course there are exceptions, such as the number of chile peppers in a dish, which I may change the first time.

Dave,

Well, I would try to make one of Pepin's recipes as given the first time (assuming I had all the correct ingredients) because I would assume that he knew better than I did. But for the majority of cookbooks/magazine? Not really; I'll happily change bits of the recipe which I know aren't quite right ("whoa, that's way too much water").

It's interesting that they/Kenji say "you can assume a great amount of knowledge" in the recipe reader. I recently saw a column by a lady who used to write recipes for Mark Bittman, and she talked about how you had to assume the reader knew nothing about technique and spell out every step.

I guess it may depend on your audience. Kenji's readers on Serious Eats are into food and cooking, while the average NY Times reader of a Bittman column may not be a regular cook.