5 thoughts on Making sense of modern recipes It's not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems

• Chris Aldrich mentioned this post 5 years ago.

  Read Modern Recipes: A Case of Miscommunication by Peter Hertzmann (dl.hertzmann.com)

  Chef and food instructor takes a look at the history of recipes and how they’re frequently misinterpreted.

  (Hat tip to Jeremy Cherfas and his excellent Eat This Podcast episode Making sense of modern recipes: It’s not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems for directing me to Hertzmann’s paper; some of my favorite episodes feature Jeremy interviewing him.)
  Keep in mind that the paper which is highlighted and excerpted here is a draft version and not for direct citation or attribution.

  recipe is simply ‘a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making something’.2 There is no guarantee implied or stated that the cook will understand either the statement of ingredients or the procedure. ❧

  –November 24, 2019 at 02:41PM

  Fourteenth-century recipe collections that have survived to today, such as Viandier pour appareiller toutes manières de viandes, Libre de sent sovi, Daz bûch von gûter spîse, and Forme of Cury, were written by professional cooks to use as an aide-mémoire for themselves or other professional cooks. ❧

  –November 24, 2019 at 02:42PM

  Le Ménagier de Paris, written near the end of the century was arguably the first cookbook written as a set of instructions for a second party to use when managing a third party, in this case, for the young wife of an elderly gentleman to use as a guide for household management including supervising the cook. ❧

  It’s not indicated well here in the text, but this was written in 1393 according to the footnote.
  Le Ménagier de Paris, 2 vols (Paris: the author, 1393; repr. Paris: Jerome Pichon, 1846)–November 24, 2019 at 02:43PM

  The suggested alternative cooking technique ignores that braising is performed slowly, with low heat, and in a steam environment. ❧

  –November 24, 2019 at 03:15PM

  Lincoln suggested that all volumetric measurements required an adjective such as heaping, rounded, or level.2❧

  I’ve heard of these, but not seen them as descriptors in quite a while and they always seemed “fluffy” to me anyway.–November 24, 2019 at 03:25PM

  Kosher salt: This salt should in practice be referred to as koshering salt, its original purpose. U.S. chefs started using Diamond Crystal-brand Kosher Salt in the 1990s because it was the only coarse salt commonly available to them. Rather than specify a brand or coarseness in their cookbooks, they chose the unfortunate term of ‘kosher salt’. Kosher salt is not purer than other salts, and all kosher salts are not equal. When measured volumetrically, all kosher salts have different amounts of salt. Nonetheless, many authors insist on specifying a volumetric amount of kosher salt—‘1 teaspoon kosher salt’—but do not identify the brand being used.36❧

  The only author I’ve known to differentiate has been Michael Ruhlman, but even he didn’t specify the brand and essentially said that when using “Kosher salt” to use twice as much as specified compared to standard table salt, presumably to account for the densities involved.–November 24, 2019 at 03:38PM

  This is to say, the ingredients and the quantities thereof are indicated by pictures which most illiterate persons can understand and persons with poor vision can see; and which are readily grasped by the minds of those who are not in the above classes. ❧

  an early example of accessibility UI in a cook book.–November 24, 2019 at 04:00PM

  Further, as stated, by merely glancing at the pictorially indicated recipe of the present invention the cook can ascertain at a glance the required ingredients, can ascertain whether such ingredients are on hand, and, if not, the needed articles will be more easily remembered in purchasing the days supply of groceries, etc. ❧

  an example in the wild of visual memory being stronger than other forms.–November 24, 2019 at 04:02PM

  The book goes closer to teaching the reader to cook than most modern books. ❧

  My thoughts as well. Ratio is a fantastic cooking book.–November 24, 2019 at 04:04PM

  At least one, somewhat successful, cookbook has been published claiming to teach cooking without recipes.40❧

  Bookmark to read in future: Glynn Christian, How to Cook Without Recipes(London: Portico Books, 2008).
  The numbering of the annotations is slightly off here….–November 24, 2019 at 04:05PM

  Most modern cookbook authors claim to meet the conditions for a ‘good recipe’ as described by Elisabeth Luard:42

  A good recipe is one that first encourages the reader to cook, and then delivers what it promises. A well-written recipe takes you by the hand and says, don’t worry, it’ll all be okay, this is what you’re looking for, this is what happens when you chop or slice or apply heat, and if it goes wrong, this is how to fix it. And when you’ve finished, this is what it should look and taste like, this is what to eat it with. But above all, take joy in what you do.

  In reality, most authors fail to meet the above conditions. It would probably be better if authors tried to match the writing of earlier recipe authors from the first half of the twentieth century when less space was given to fancy illustrations and more words were given to how to cook. ❧❧❧

  –November 24, 2019 at 04:09PM

  Mount: A cooking technique where small pieces of butter are quickly incorporated in a hot, but not boiling, sauce to give bulk and a glossy appearance. ❧

  A definition I don’t recall having ever seen before.–November 24, 2019 at 04:17PM

  The technical term for the zest is the flavedo. ❧

  flavedo is a new word to me–November 24, 2019 at 04:27PM

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• Chris Aldrich commented 5 years ago.

  Bookmarked Making sense of modern recipes It’s not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems by Jeremy Cherfas (Eat This Podcast)

  Peter Hertzmann’s website à la carte will keep you occupied for hours. If you just want the paper we were talking about, here it is.

  Measure for Measure is the article I mentioned by Raymond Sokolov on why Americans measure by volume. It was published in Natural History magazine, July 1988, pp 80–83, and there seems also to be a version in the 1988 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking. Good luck finding it online. Or, drop me a note …
  I was pleasantly surprised to find a facsimile of the original Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book at Amazon.

  I want to read a few of these sources from Jeremy’s podcast–particularly the Hertzmann paper Modern Recipes: A Case of Miscommunication.
  I had previously heard a reference (though I don’t recall where) to Fanny Farmer’s cookbook helping to popularize the American use of the cup measure. It certainly hasn’t done American cooking any favors.

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• Chris Aldrich commented 5 years ago.

  Listened to Making sense of modern recipes It’s not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

  If possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.

  Peter Hertzmann tells a great story of a chef telling a bunch of students to go and double the recipe for a batch of cookies. Minutes later, one returned and said he couldn’t do it because the oven wouldn’t go up to 700 degrees. Ho, ho, ho.
  But there’s a serious issue here for people who are trying to follow a recipe without a clear understanding of the process and methods beneath it. Come to think of it, Peter says, even for professionals, there can be big problems trying to follow some modern recipes. Which prompts me to wonder, how many people these days buy cookbooks in order to use the recipes?
  Notes

  Peter Hertzmann’s website à la carte will keep you occupied for hours. If you just want the paper we were talking about, here it is.

  Measure for Measure is the article I mentioned by Raymond Sokolov on why Americans measure by volume. It was published in Natural History magazine, July 1988, pp 80–83, and there seems also to be a version in the 1988 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking. Good luck finding it online. Or, drop me a note …
  I was pleasantly surprised to find a facsimile of the original Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book at Amazon.
  Thanks to Dr Ana Tominc and the organisers for allowing me to attend the 1st Biennial Conference on Food and Communication at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.
  Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

  Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:16 — 19.2MB)
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  So many useful and important things in this episode. We need more content about food that helps teach people how to really cook. There isn’t nearly enough basic knowledge about science among cooks for them to really do their job as well as they should. Too much cooking media these days is geared at aspirational cooking rather than actual cooking. Our sad dependence on recipes is just deplorable. It kills me that most people don’t know how to properly measure ingredients.

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• Anonymous mentioned this post 6 years ago.

  This Article was mentioned on blog.henrikcarlsson.se

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• Charmaine McFarlane mentioned this post 6 years ago.

  “There’s a serious issue here for people who are trying to follow a recipe without a clear understanding of the process and methods beneath it…Which prompts me to wonder, how many people these days buy cookbooks in order to use the recipes?

  eatthispodcast.com/making-sense-o…

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