I have a pet peeve about how recipes are presented ......

[Stinky The Clown]

Why do they use such clipped and stilted language?

"Add 1C sugar to mixture"

Why not the more prosaic "Add one cup of sugar to the mixture you just created"?

Yes, it is wordier. So what?

I can understand hand written recipes being clipped. But printed recipes?

What's the point?

[Warpy]

1. Perhaps when the average non cook is standing

amidst a disaster in the kitchen, drips running down the cabinet and a fine haze of flour wafting through the air, the fewer words the better.

I grew up watching a non cook struggle daily with getting something non poisonous onto the dinner table.

[supernova]

2. Wow, trivia payload!

H2S, you asked the question of the day. I found a really good and long http://www.answers.com/topic/recipe">article on the history of the recipe over at About.com. Some highlights:

snip
The form of a recipe has been broadly consistent for thousands of years, although older recipes usually provide less detail because cooks had command of the techniques, which tended to be less demanding. The ancient Greek cookery writer Philoxenus of Leucas wrote, "For the casserole is not bad, though I think the frying-pan better." Elsewhere he advised, "The wriggling polyp, if it be rather large, is much better boiled than baked, if you beat it until it is tender" (Athenaeus, vol. 1, 1927, pp. 21, 23). If these are typical, they help explain why the vast gastronomic compilation The Deipnosophists (Philosophers of dinner) made by Athenaeus about 1,800 years ago includes so few recognizable recipes. Philoxenus's advice presumably helped with novel foods in the flourishing Greek marketplace.

....

While recipes seem to promise the whole world of cooking, there is pressure to rely on a standard repertoire of techniques. Successful recipe writers are advised to restrict themselves to readily available ingredients. Recipe-based cooking favors smart-seeming compositions over untouched foods, however excellent.

....

Written recipes are presumably as old as literacy, which emerged to control food supplies in the earliest civilizations. Recorded instructions had the advantages of wide and accurate transmission and archival retrieval. The power of naming, discussing, and borrowing was reserved to the tiny literate elite for thousands of years, contributing to the separation of high cooking, investigated by the social anthropologist Jack Goody in Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (1982).

....

In medieval English manuscripts, numerous sentences begin "Tak wyte wyn" (Take white wine) and "Tak partrichys rostyd" (Take roasted partridges). Others instruct "Nym water" and "Nym swete mylk," using the archaic "nim" (or "nym"), which means "take." Yet others start "Recipe brede gratyd, & eggis" (Take grated bread and eggs), borrowing the Latin verb recipere (to take). Medieval recipes generally did not include measurements and times, providing a challenge for modern interpreters, who often are divided over how spicy the original dishes tasted.

I've always noticed how similar recipes look to your average chemistry lab report. I guess the answer is that you wanted to be specific without being so technical or precise, except in baking, that someone else couldn't follow your instructions.

[Hekate]

15. The mind boggles at the "wriggling polyp"--which will definitely stop wriggling if you beat it.

What IS that thing?

I love reading really old recipes.

Fanny Farmer codified measurements and the lab report writing style at her Boston Cooking School and in her book, at least for Americans. Before that, if your grandma was known far and wide as a fabulous hand at baking, all her "receipts" might have instructions for a handful of this or a dessert-spoonful of that and no one else could duplicate it. You learned to weigh and measure in the palm of your own hand, and your dessert-spoons might be a different size than anyone else's. "Domestic science" really did try to bring science into the home.

Hekate

[hippywife]

3. But, but, but...

if you can print it, that means someone had to type it. ;)

[Sentath]

4. Mmm.. part and part

I support the specifying of which mixture to add the sugar to. E.G. "Add 1C sugar to egg mixture"

I despise recipes that hide the measurements in the text, forcing me to parse the whole line again to recheck the volume of ingredient that I'm dealing with in this step. Yes, its less than a second, yes it still takes over twice as long.

[yy4me]

5. I agree with that, have a ten ot 15 year old Better Homes

cookbook (the red & white checked one we all have) that has many ingredients buried in the text. Mainly salt. On half of the recipe's I use, salt appears in the text only. I have to read carefully as I lay out my ingredients.

Seems it was deliberate on their part because it is done so often. I have often wondered why?

[pengillian101]

6. Here's a site that is interesting.

Food and recipe timeline. Clickable links within to all kinds of fun stuff.

http://www.foodtimeline.org

:-)

[supernova]

9. Thank you!

Looks very interesting, esp for historical background research if one were writing a novel that featured historical food. :-)

[NashVegas]

7. They'd Rather Be Cooking Than Typing?

One of these days I'm going to have to scan for you a recipe that was handed to me by the chef at a Vermont inn.

[Stinky The Clown]

8. I have no problem at all with handwritten recipes being clipped and terse .....

I was talking about published recipes ..... like in the newspaper and magazines and in cook books.

[Redstone]

10. I actually wrote a cookbook four years ago. It was one of those

"community cookbooks" to benefit the library in a small town in Vermont.

And I translated almost all the recipes to the "long form" as you recommended above.

What's even more mystifying to me is how many restaurant menus use the "w/" short form.

Redstone

[Rabrrrrrr]

11. This is what I would prefer - something that's actually specific.

Ingredients:

1. 532.35 cm3 gluten
2. 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3. 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4. 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
5. 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6. 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7. 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
8. Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein
9. 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10. 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)

To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is homogenous.

To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredient nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.

Using a screw extruder attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnston's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

[Stinky The Clown]

12. Aw c'mon .... any damned fool knows it needs to be .......

........ 176 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11, not 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11. The reaction will fail if the unrefined crystalline components are exactly in balance.

[Warpy]

13. I think you'll find the recipe more satisfactory

if you convert to gm. rather than cc.

[mtnester]

14. Because I choose to find humor in everything right now on Day 4 of NO POWER

due to Ike - in OHIO (sheesh) (NOTE: I just love reading historical recipes, so I completely agree that the "character" of recipes is a lost art.) Here are some interesting historical recipe "reads."

Syllabub Pudding
Make one quart of rich cream very sweet, grate half a nutmeg over it, put it into a china bowl and milk a cow into it, that it many become very frothy.

Mushroom Catsup
Put mushrooms into a jar, squeeze them with your hand, strew with salt and let them lay two days. Strain through a coarse cloth, put them on the fire with allspice, cloves, mace and whole pepper. Boil well for an hour. Strain again. When cold, put into bottles.

An English Monkey
Soak one cupful of bread crumbs in one cupful of milk about 10 or 15 minutes. Melt one tablespoon of butter, add one cupful of cheese broken into small pieces; Stir until melted, add the crumbs and one beaten egg, one half teaspoon of salt, a few grains of bicarbonate of soda as large as a pea. Cook for five minutes. Serve on wafers.

Jumble Cake
One teacup of butter, one and one-half teacups of sugar, one and one-half pints of flour; four eggs, two teaspoonfuls of cinnamon, one-half teacup of almonds chopped fine, two teaspoonfuls of yeast powder sifted in the flour. Beat the butter, sugar and eggs together, then add the flour. Put cinnamon and almonds in and work the whole up well, then roll on the board to thickness of half an inch, and cut out a finger’s length and join together at ends, so as to be round. Grease pans with butter and put to bake.

VICTORIAN SOFT CRULLERS
Sift three-quarters of a pound of flour, and powder half a pound of loaf-sugar; heat a pint of water in a round-bottomed saucepan, and when quite warm, mix the flour with it gradually; set half a pound of fresh butter over the fire in a small vessel; and when it begins to melt, stir it gradually into the flour and water; then add by degrees the powdered sugar and half a grated nutmeg. Take the saucepan off the fire, and beat the contents with a wooden spaddle or spatula, till they are thoroughly mixed; then beat six eggs very light, and stir them gradually into the mixture. Beat the whole very hard, till it becomes a thick batter. Flour a pasteboard very well, and lay out the batter upon it in rings (the best way is to pass it through a screw funnel). Have ready, on the fire, a pot of boiling lard of the very best quality; put in the crullers, removing them from the board by carefully taking them up, one at a time, on a broad-bladed knife. Boil but few at a time. They must be a fine brown. Lift them out on a perforated skimmer, draining the lard from them back into the pot; lay them on a large dish, and sift powdered white sugar over them. Soft crullers cannot be made in warm weather.