How to Structure a Recipe (Part 1)

I know I said on Saturday that I'd talk about series and semicolons, but I have a migraine today so I'm going to talk about how to structure a recipe. I didn't include the recipe for the applesauce cake I made yesterday because although it's hand-written and hanging on my fridge, it's not in any shape to type or share with others.

I've spent a good deal of my adult life involved with the food and recipe business. In the 1980s I worked for three summers and two winters at a bistro-type restaurant in Massachusetts, starting as a food prep person and at the end a cook. But it was a small place so I continued to prep food, bake bread, make certain appetizers, and whatever else was needed.

When I worked as a production editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, in the trade division, I learned how to edit cookbooks so I could instruct copy editors and proofreaders on how I wanted it done, as well as indexers on how I wanted the index prepared. Afterward I copy edited cookbooks for a while, and now I just proofread them. When I go online to look for recipes for dishes I'm curious about, such as tres leches cake or key lime pie or pecan pie (there are dozens of versions of these common recipes, too, so I had to figure out which one might turn out the best), I find myself guided to many sites where recipes are published, and this is where the tragedy (others might call it comedy) begins.

It seems that people who blog about recipes or contribute recipes to web sites have never read cookbooks or noticed that there is an order to things. A recipe is like a chemical formula: one mistake and the dish could be ruined. I know as I write that this statement is not always entirely true, but if it's a recipe for a cake or for most baked goods, it is more often true than not.

So, for those who want to learn, if for no other reason than sharing recipes with friends, here's the basic rule: Ingredients are listed in the order of use. If you're making a stew where you brown all the flavoring and aromatic ingredients, such as onions, garlic, tomatoes, celery, and potatoes, then you add the meat, the meat ingredient is not the first thing you list. Of course there are exceptions. For instance, suppose you want the cook to buy a chuck roast then cut it into 1-inch cubes. If so, that could be the first ingredient, but you could also give the ingredient like this:

     One 2-pound chuck roast, cut into 1-inch cubes

In which case, you'd put it at the place where you add it to the other ingredients, not before them. The best practice is to read cookbooks and see how things are done. The best examples are going to be the cookbooks published by Knopf, Artisan, and houses that specialize in cookbooks and have been doing so for many years. Try The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. The Joy of Cooking is idiosyncratic, so I wouldn't suggest following its style; Julia Child's books are all instructional, so she also tells you what pans and bowls to use, which is helpful if you're learning but a nuisance if you already know. One of the games I play in the kitchen is to see whether I can save using all the pans, bowls, and implements Julia calls for in preparing one of her dishes.

You can always save steps in the body of the text that instructs the reader on how to prepare the dish by including the description of the way you want the ingredient prepared in the ingredients list.

Make sure you don't omit ingredients or instructions. It is very easy to forget to list an essential flavoring such as salt, and if you want the cook to use freshly ground pepper, that's the way you must always word it in the ingredients list. If you're making pumpkin pie and you want the cook to use freshly grated nutmeg, that's how you must list it. If you want the cook to use fresh cilantro, you can list it is several ways: whole fresh cilantro leaves, to taste; fresh cilantro, coarsely chopped; 1 tablespoon finely minced cilantro [or cilantro leaves, if you want to be really specific], or a combination of any of these approaches.

Also note that this cilantro list is an example of a series of things containing both semicolons and commas. It is constructed this way because each item contains a comma, so the semicolon provides a more definite division among the items. Using nothing but commas would cause confusion.

Make sure you don't omit steps. Some cookbook writers number their steps so that they are easy to follow, but others do not. It's kind of a custom to separate steps into individual paragraphs, but if that's the case, it's easy to drop a paragraph somewhere along the way. It's easy to drop a word or a sentence, especially if the recipes are basically all very similar, such as would be found in a cookbook of nothing but ice cream recipes. It's easy to miss reading a step that's combined with another one in the same paragraph. There is nothing more frustrating to a cook that to be going along, following the steps, and find that suddenly, like Wile E. Coyote, they're falling down a cliff wall into the nothingness of instructionless hell. What's supposed to happen with the liquids? Do they go in all at once or in parts?

When I was seventeen, my mother gave me a meatloaf recipe over the phone. She told me all the ingredients to add to the meat, including "a can of tomatoes." I thought it might be interesting to add some Italian seasonings too, so I put in some oregano and basil. Needless to say, I couldn't make a meatloaf out of the mess I got, and endless cooking in a Pyrex loaf pan did not get rid of all that tomato juice. My family tried to eat it, but everyone ended up saying they weren't hungry, then sneaking into the fridge all evening to look for something to eat. And worst of all, when we offered what was left to the dog, good old Buster, he took one sniff and walked away from it.

Cookbook writers need to tell cooks when to drain the juice off a can of tomatoes as well as perhaps advising them of what seasonings work best in their recipes. This doesn't mean that people won't experiment on their own, but it only takes one time to learn that certain combinations of flavors and textures really are revolting.