Writing the Recipe

This article may be published freely, in print and online, as long as the byline and resource box at the end are included as written. Thank you. Writing the Recipe (c)2003 Pam White It sounds simple. Sell your family recipes for money. Gather up your community's traditional dishes and submit them to magazines. List meals you make for guests and slap together a cookbook. Right? Wrong. Writing down recipes is an art, and one that keeps reinventing itself. I have a wonderful cookbook - "The Home Queen Cookbook" - that is packed with recipes submitted by the wives of governor's, senator's, famous businessmen, and other notables. This book was published in the late 1800's, after Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking School cookbook was published, but those fine home queens' submissions are less than standard in their presentation. Sponge Cake - "Ten eggs, weight of 8 in sugar and four in flour, flavor with lemon, add a pinch of salt." That is the entire recipe and while seasoned cooks might be able to understand what is meant, and professional chefs sympathetic to the simple notes made for memory's sake, new cooks would be stumped by this listing of ingredients. Write simply, but not as simply as the Home Queens did. Remember that omissions or mistakes are disastrous to the cook using your recipe, and will also hurt your reputation with editors. Think about how you felt the first time a "friend" shared a fantastic recipe with you but left out one or two of the ingredients so your version would never be as good as hers or his. If you've never been the victim of a recipe-otomy then your friends are true. If you have, you have my sympathy. We all have our own way of creating dishes