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

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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

1. 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.
2. 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 …
3. I was pleasantly surprised to find a facsimile of the original Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book at Amazon.
4. 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.
5. Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

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