PERSPECTIVES
The Trouble with Recipes

I have a longstanding objection to washing dishes I didn't need to dirty in the first place.

Which is why, when a cookie recipe tells me to mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another, I tend to regard that second bowl as a suggestion rather than a requirement.

I know why the instructions are written that way. Mixing dry ingredients separately distributes them evenly, and adding them to the wet ingredients at the end can help prevent overmixing. There are perfectly good reasons for doing it. But sometimes I'm making cookies, not conducting a controlled experiment, and I can accomplish the same thing with one bowl and considerably less cleanup.

When I wrote recipes for my cooking blog, I was upfront about decisions like that. If I took a shortcut or ignored conventional advice, I explained my reasoning. I wanted readers to understand what I was doing and why, even if they chose to do it differently.

Sometimes what I offered wasn't really a recipe at all. It was a method.

That distinction would eventually become central to a very different kind of instructional writing.

Until done (apparently)

I've edited cookbooks, recipes, and food blogs, and I've encountered some wonderfully unhelpful instructions.

"Cook until done."

"Season until it tastes right."

"Use fresh garlic. The jarred stuff is terrible."

That last one is an opinion, not an instruction. And while an author is perfectly entitled to have strong feelings about garlic, some people use the jarred stuff. Dinner will survive.

The other two are more interesting because they aren't necessarily wrong; they're incomplete.

An experienced cook knows what done looks like. They can recognize when something should be golden brown, fork-tender, or firm enough to hold its shape. They can taste a sauce and identify what's missing. Someone making the dish for the first time may have no idea what they're aiming for, much less how to recognize when they've reached it.

Precise measurements don't always solve the problem, either. Eight minutes on one stove might produce something entirely different from eight minutes on another. The reader needs something to evaluate besides the clock.

I sometimes told readers that a mixture should taste a little too sharp or strongly seasoned at a particular stage. Other ingredients would be added later, mellowing and distributing those flavors. Without that explanation, someone might taste the mixture, assume they'd made a mistake, and start correcting something that wasn't wrong.

I wasn't asking them to trust me blindly. I was giving them a reference point.

This is also where an editor has to exercise some judgment. A food writer's personality is often part of the appeal, and I have no interest in stripping the opinions and quirks out of someone's work. But there's a difference between an author explaining why they prefer fresh garlic and insisting that the recipe will fail without it.

If fresh garlic is essential to the result, explain why. Otherwise, let people use what's in their refrigerators.

From cookie dough to digital magazines

At LibreDigital, I wrote and maintained a user manual for production teams converting print magazines into digital publications. It was a process I supported for years, and the work presented a challenge that would have been familiar to anyone who'd ever tried to write a recipe for an unpredictable kitchen.

No two titles or issues were quite alike.

Publishers used different layouts, fonts, graphics, and design conventions, and even an established title might introduce an entirely different design for a special issue or change its layout altogether. Text overlapped photographs, appeared inside decorative elements, or became part of artwork in ways that made it difficult to separate. Two pages from the same magazine could look similar but behave differently during conversion.

I couldn't possibly document every combination. A specialist might follow the instructions perfectly on one magazine and encounter something entirely different in the next.

So instead of writing rules for every imaginable situation, I built examples around the decisions the teams needed to make.

One recurring problem involved removing text from images.

In digital conversion, text sometimes needed to be removed from an image so it could be handled separately in the finished publication. Unfortunately, removing the text didn't guarantee that the image would be usable. Graphic elements could remain behind, artwork could be damaged, and cropping could solve one problem while creating another.

I documented different treatments of the same image, marking each valid or invalid and explaining the reasoning. Removing the text could leave graphic boxes and outlines behind. Cropping away those elements might solve that problem but sacrifice too much of the photograph. A more selective crop, however, could remove the problematic upper text while preserving the image and an acceptable lower callout.

The point wasn't to remove every trace of text. It was to produce a usable image without unnecessarily compromising the original artwork.

The examples gave specialists a way to evaluate unfamiliar layouts rather than simply imitate a particular solution. They could recognize what had gone wrong, consider alternatives, and understand why an approach that worked for one image might fail for another.

And because I maintained the documentation over time, I could incorporate new problems and examples as the teams encountered them.

The same concern for usable output also informed a separate project in which I helped design a text-removal preview capability. That work focused on making the result visible before committing to a full conversion.

Text-Removal Preview: Designing for Accurate Output

The problem with following directions

Consider a recipe that tells you to cook onions for eight minutes. At the end of eight minutes, they're still firm and opaque.

Do you stop?

Probably not, assuming you know the recipe expects softened, translucent onions. But if the instructions only specify a time, a less experienced cook might not know that the onions haven't reached the intended stage.

The same thing happened with magazine images. A specialist could remove every bit of text and still produce an unacceptable result. The operation had succeeded, but the image hadn't.

In the conversion manual, I wanted people to see those failures, not just the successful examples. A clean-looking image could still be wrong if too much of the original composition had been removed. A small amount of remaining text, on the other hand, might be perfectly acceptable.

The distinction wasn't always obvious, and it couldn't be reduced to a rule about how much text or cropping was allowed.

This is one reason I think examples of unsuccessful approaches are so valuable in instructional material. They expose the boundaries of a decision. They show what can go wrong even when someone follows a reasonable course of action, and they give readers a chance to recognize those problems before encountering them in their own work.

It's also why I don't believe every instruction should be treated as equally inflexible.

Some rules are essential. Ignore them and you might ruin a cake, corrupt a file, or create considerably more work for everyone involved. Others describe a preferred method, a common convention, or simply the way the author has always done something.

A reader who understands the purpose of a step is better equipped to distinguish among them.

Knowing what matters

I've spent a considerable amount of my career writing and editing instructions, from cookbooks and food blogs to production manuals and software documentation. The subjects have been wildly different, but the challenge is familiar: someone knows how to do something, and someone else needs to learn.

The difficulty is deciding how much of that knowledge needs to be made explicit.

A beginner may need precise steps, explanations of unfamiliar terms, and descriptions of what the result should look like. Someone with more experience may need only a reminder of the method or a warning about an unusual exception. And when a process involves judgment, no amount of procedural detail can substitute for explaining the principles behind the decisions.

That doesn't mean abandoning rules or leaving readers to figure everything out for themselves. It means giving them the information they need to recognize when a rule applies, when an alternative is acceptable, and when something has gone wrong.

I still think a good recipe should help someone make dinner successfully. But a really useful one teaches them enough to recognize when something isn't working, understand why, and decide what to do about it.

The best instructions don't just tell people what to do. They teach people how to know what to do when the instructions no longer fit.

And if they can save someone from washing an unnecessary bowl along the way, so much the better.