Slow News

Maybe now that all the restaurants have been closed by the pandemic, you are doing some more cooking.

I don’t have very strong opinions about recipes, but I have strong opinions about how they should be presented.

Cookbooks generally list ingredients first, followed by instructions. Why is that bad? For one thing, it’s redundant. Each ingredient is mentioned in the list, and then mentioned again in the directions. Another problem is that usually the amount of the ingredient is only mentioned in the list, not in the directions. This means you have to scan back and forth between the list and the instructions every time you forget if its 2 teaspoons or 3, one onion or two, etc. When I’m going back and forth between the cutting board, the fridge, the stove, and the recipe, its one more complication to make cooking just a little harder.

My solution is eliminate the ingredient list and to include the amounts in the instructions

This makes an obvious new problem: when you want to go shopping, how do you find the ingredients hiding in the instructions?

The solution is: make the ingredients boldface and in color. Not only does this make them stand out from the page, but the added color brings an unintended extra benefit: it can convey meaning. Thus (for instance), produce can be written in green, refrigerated and frozen food in dark and light blue, and non-refrigerated packaged goods in red. This makes compiling a shopping list even easier, because it shows at a glance which stuff needs to be bought in which part of the store. I find that the categorization also helps me think about the recipe, because its easier to remember items if they are combined into categories.

To show what this looks like, I’ve included my own set of recipes. This began as nothing more than an attempt to put together the ones I often use rather than leafing through Moosewood (the source of many of them) or searching the internet. There are no original recipes – except for the intriguing one on page 16. My biggest hope is that my format catches on and real cookbook writers use it in the future.

It could be that I’m already too late, because on the internet “page space” is irrelevant. Also information can be packaged in several different ways with the preferred bundling chosen on the fly by the user. However, I think there is still some value to a concise, simple, static page showing the recipe. As long as people are still writing cookbooks – they should eliminate the ingredient list.