Writing the Recipe
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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