Have to vent about people who think they can write recipes (but can't)

[Suzanne]

Sorry -- but right now I'm working on a diet book that includes recipes. The authors know nothing about purchasing or cooking (a 4-ounce can of tomato sauce? 1 tablespoon of crushed red pepper for 2 servings of Puttanesca sauce? ). But I just hit the worst-written recipe so far: they stole someone's recipe for a dish that is supposed to serve 6, and just divided everything by 3 to get it down to 2 servings. So that means:

1/3 leek
2/3 clove garlic
1/3 tablespoon grated ginger
2/3 red onion, quartered
1/3 tomato, diced
1/3 tablespoon dates, seeded and diced (my favorite!! )
1/3 lemon juice (yup, that's what it says )

Oh, and by the way: one author is an MD, the other an ND (? nutrition something?). So they probably think they know everything. Well, they don't.

Again, sorry, just had to vent.

[shel]

So, how do you deal with such a situation?

Shel

[Greg]

That was a poorly written recipe before it was scaled down. Garlic cloves, tomatoes, leeks, etc, do not come in uniform sizes, so the flavor will never be consistent. Scale it down and it becomes downright bizaare.

1 tablespoon of crushed red pepper for 2 servings of Puttanesca sauce?

What? Sounds right to me.

[KYHeirloomer]

In all due respect to the job you do, Suzanne, I have to say I'm not the least bit surprised.

Try going through 25 years worth of cooking magazines all at once, as I recently did; and try following cookbook directions more carefully for editorial review reasons, and several things become all too apparent:

1. When it comes to recipes, the copyright laws may as well not exist. Recipes are picked up, with no attribution, at an alarming rate. And if there are errors in the original, they get repeated, for one or more of the reasons below.
I'm not talking about making minor changes and calling it a new recipe. I'm talking about the exact same recipes, picked up and presented as new by a different magazine or in another cookbook.

2. Many times, recipes from chefs in particular are mathamatically scaled down, but never tested. As a result, they don't work.

3. Very few recipes are proofread. The number of printed recipes that contain errors in the ingredient list, the directions, or both is greater than the number that don't. This problem is even worse on internet recipe sites.
There also seems to be an interesting correlation: The greater the celebrity of the chef, the less likely he (or she) has proofread the recipes.

4. Despite disclaimers to the contrary, I find it difficult to believe that most recipes are kitchen tested. There's just no way so many of them could be so far off if they had been.

5. Cookbooks and magazines with a "health" slant are the worst offenders. I have, for instance, yet to find a single diabetic cookbook whose recipes I trust. I mean, if you try one and there's a problem, it happens. But if you try five, or six, or a dozen, and they're all wrong; and that happens in every book you examine, well----but that's the exact problem you just detailed.

What bothers me most about all this is the number of home cooks who blame themselves when a recipe doesn't work out, when all the time it was the recipe publisher who was to blame.

[RAS1187]

I laughed at similar recipe books when I was working at chains. I was supposed to sauce a order of wings completely with just 1.5 oz.

I am not a huge fan of recipes (unless were baking, different story then). When we do menu specials, the only thing I have to work with is the typed menu that the customer gets.

[MikeLM]

Suzanne-

"Oh, and by the way: one author is an MD..."

Brings back an interesting memory:

Forty years or so ago,there was an article in Time magazine about the unjustified self-confidence of MDs. They examined the Federal Aviation Administration's analysis of civil aviation accident statistics, and found that MDs who were licensed pilots had a VERY much higher accident rate than run-of-the-mill private pilots.

Looking at the details of these MDs accidents, they found that the MDs had a greater propensity to fly into conditions for which they were not qualified, ignoring weather reports, violating limitations on their licenses, and the like.

Maybe they don't pay attention to limitations on their culinary qualifications, either.

Mike

[OahuAmateurChef]

This reminds me of how rocket scientists can get together to design a complex piece of machinery. They are indeed experts in choosing all the right metal alloys to work well with each other and all of the parts are the precisely correct choice to do the job.

But try and work on that machine or build it from parts and we might soon realize that it was designed on paper and not including trial and error testing.

[foodpump]

What really cracks me up with so -called "professional recipies" is the measurements...

Now, for gawds sake how the (delated) do I measure 10 tbsp of butter? Am I really stupid enough to pour 1/3 cup of honey or mollases in a cup, only to pour it out again and then deal with washing out a sticky and dirty measuring cup?

Then there's the cooking magazine mish-mash for so-called professional recipies, gave up laughing about it, gave up writing letters about it. I just accept it as a fact of life, albeit an incredibly stupid one: In all the N.American cooking mags and glossy books chocolate is invariably measured in ounces by weight, sugar in cups, flour sometime in cups but more commonly now by weight (it was discovered in the cooking mags that weighing flour is far more accurate.... Big news, bakers around the world have been doing it since the Egyptians were doing their graffiti thing on pyramid walls...) butter in sticks, tbsps, or cups ( only the US has butter in sticks...) chopped nuts in cups, liquids in cups... Us Canucks are even stupider, we've converted everything to milliliters. Nope, you won't find any weights on CDN recipies. I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

I just look at the recipies and get ideas. If it contains any baking ideas that I want to try out, I drag out my "stupidity conversion table" and convert all the weird-a** measurements to weight measurements, I also automatically deduct 10% of the sugar quantity for any southern US recipie, and rely on my experience.

A professional baker's recipe will only give two items of information: The ingredients, listed in order of working stages, and the weights. Nothing else, it's assumed that the baker knows the procedure and techniques.

[lentil]

I am by no means a prof baker; in fact, I hate baking for the most part. Therefore my copied recipes are reduced to their simplest form- ings listed in order of appearance and usually saying something like "combine dry, mix wet, combine all. (usually for simple cakes or muffins). I hired a CIA trained baker with an impressive resume who was getting back into the business after a long hiatus (now I know the whys of the hiatus). This woman COULD NOT follow my recipes. She had no idea what I meant. After she left, I found her notes on my recipes that said things like, "mix butter until light and fluffy, add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition...."

I do not miss her one bit!

[kuan]

I like this part Suzanne.

2/3 red onion, quartered

Hmm... that means, 3/8ths... hm, nope, 2/17th... wait, first, take one onion and divide by three that's 1/3, two times that, and then how do I quarter a third?

I think I need a two fifths of vodka.

[shroomgirl]

ok, turn it around......magazines that bastardize your recipes. Change techniques or ingredients, talk about frustrating. I tested out my recipes at least 3x with an assitant taking notes on measurements, timing (30 minute recipes), etc.....send them in and things are changed, stuff that would have saved time (like wilting spinach in a microwave) or switching pad thai noodles for rice stick. Got to the point after talking to several authors that I realized when you sell recipes they then belong to the publisher for all intense purposes except each time they reprint you get money.

I cannot tell you how many times I've stood at a kitchen door with pencil and paper in hand writing out "recipes" for a chef who didn't pull something they already had in the "can" to something new.......threats of showing up in CA for a long overdue recipe worked but to have to resort to that is not fun.....Authors are usually the best, just send me the book and I'll work with you on which works best logistically for the stage.

[Suzanne]

Thanks, all. Your comments are a big help.

Shel -- what did I do? After I wrote a note on the page about how I knew what they did and how they really needed to test the recipe -- which I then erased just enough so that my boss would see it but still be able to cover it with Wite-out so that the authors won't -- I changes all the measurements so that a normal person could try to make the thing:

1 small leek
1 medium clove garlic
1 teaspoon grated ginger
1 small red onion, quartered
1 Roma or plum tomato, diced
1 dried date, pitted and minced
1/3 lemon juice (nothing I could do about this one except ask what the unit of measure is supposed to be)

In fact, I'm rewriting most of the recipes so that someone could actually make them (although why anyone would want to is beyond me. )

KYH -- I agree with everything you said. And this is a diet book! So you can imagine how awful the recipes are. And it is 100% clear to me that the authors never tested a thing. That, sadly, seems to be the norm for books by people who are not professional cookbook/recipe writers -- they don't know how difficult it is, and think they can just throw any old thing down on paper.

RAS1187 -- I used to write recipes at restaurants -- but never would have given a measurement for portioning. That's just so chain!

MikeLM -- One reason I brought up the MD thing is that a couple of years ago I worked on a book by one, that also included diet advice. The guy kept telling readers to eat some "cocoa-based chocolate" every day. :huh: I asked if he meant dark chocolate, since all real chocolate is "cocoa-based." He kept insisting that "c-b c" was correct. Finally I had to pull rank on him and say: "I'll let you be the degreed medical professional if you'll let me be the degreed culinary professional." When the book came out, it said dark chocolate. (And when I was asked to work on another of his books, I declined, saying that I thought he might be upset by having to deal with me again. )

OahuAmateurChef -- Uh, fwiw, my husband started out as a rocket scientist.

foodpump -- You've touched a nerve. Believe it or not, it's all Fanny Farmer's fault: she was an early standard-bearer for the volume measure, which is just about the most inaccurate way of dealing with any solid. Yeah, in North America (sorry, Canadians and maybe also Mexicans!) we use the worst possible measuring standards. But those are the standards I have to work with in cookbooks, so I just try to make the best of it (and sneak in weights whenever possible. ).

lentil -- As you are well aware, there's a huge difference between a recipe written for professionals and one written for home cooks. The latter usually has to assume that the user knows nothing and has to be given tons of information to get close to the proper result. The former assumes you know proper techniques, and just need to be told the measures and which techniques to use. (Unfortunately, you experience show that that isn't always the case; my sympathies.) When I work on a book, I often have to ask the author who the book is for: what is the reader's presumed skill level. Many books are written for the lowest common denominator -- the person who needs to be told EVERYTHING. Sad but true.

kuan -- that's pretty much what I did: first had a glass of Sherry, then went out for a nice dinner and split a bottle of wine.

shroom -- I hear ya, sister!

[shroomgirl]

several years ago a self-published then published author was on tour.....her name escapes me.
Before and After pix on the spiral bound soft cover....the recipes were horrendous. can of tomato sauce, package of seasoning glooped on a chicken breast and baked.....this is the jist, recipes were better written ingredient list was not any better. Through all the years of going to author events, she was the one who gave the best info on how to market and sell a cookbook. Amazing....she traveled to small towns, self promoted, finally by the 3rd book got on QVC and sold huge quantities in minutes....a publisher contacted her and she was on her 4 or 5 cookbook with multiple printings.
Total junk. But she knew her audience, she knew how and who to sell to, she worked it. After listening to her I realized that writing a cookbook is step one there are a whole lot more steps to getting it sold.....and most of it you have to do yourself.

[Mezzaluna]

Total junk. But she knew her audience

Shroom, I immediately thought of Sandra Lee.

Suzanne, the world is a better place because of your work. I can only imagine how frustrating your work can be! How prevalent is this problem? Surely there are some who know what they're doing....?

[foodnfoto]

Suzanne-I feel your pain-I also do some work testing, editing and rewriting recipes forwarded to me by food editors, nutritionists and such. Quite a number of my jobs involve testing recipes for a magazine that relies on readers to submit them for publication. You would not believe what gets submitted! Some readers tear out pages of magazines, or photocopy recipes from books and send them in, others are written so cryptically that I can barely figure out what I'm supposed to do. I have also found recipes submitted as original that are direct lifts from work done by people I know.

But really, some of the absolute worst are recipes written by professional chefs that assume the average cook has specialized equipment (12 3" blini pans, for example), know what "bain marie" means or that people have a quart of demiglace just hanging about in the back of their fridge, waiting to be used. Chefs-don't take this personally. I used to be among your ranks, and it took me a while to adjust my development and writing style so that it's useful to the average homecook.

Regarding some of the other posts here, I have to defend my profession a bit. I do a lot of recipe testing and development for different types of editorial venues, from magazines to small cookbooks for people suffering from kidney disease, diabetes, celiac, lactose intolerance among others. The key to making these recipes useful is a close COLLABORATION between the culinary pro (me) and the medical and dietary pro (doctors and RDs.) Thankfully, the ones I work with understand this collaboration, value my expertise and understand the limitations of their training.

The other key to success of a recipe for the generalized consumer market is an understanding of the people that make up that market-the money they have to spend on ingredients, the time they have, familiarity with and availability of ingredients, their particular regional style amid myriad others. A recipe developed for Gourmet might be very different from one developed for First for Women because the people that buy and use the recipes published in those magazines come from very different market demographics.

Due to the reality of the average American home cook's kitchen and training and our cultural history, it's unrealistic to assume that the cook will use a scale to measure ingredients. It's just not part of the average culinary vernacular in this country-people measure by volume. Chefs and foodies-you need to get over it and learn to adapt.

KYH- I think your comments are a little harsh, though I agree with you on many of your points. Blanket statements condemming all magazines for sloppy testing and inaccuracy are just incorrect and unfair. Food sections of magazines can be real drivers of sales for a rag. Some magazines invest a lot of money in testing and development, but are then so constrained by space limitation imposed by copy editors and last minute ad sales that the recipes really suffer. Other magazines have development and testing staff, but seem to only hire culinary wannabes that have no solid training (either culinary or marketing) so the recipes wind up not being very good. Sometimes, you encounter both staffing and editorial problem, but these always vary from publisher to publisher. Some magazines use a "style sheet" that defines the way a recipe should be written and how measurements are done. Again, these can be inconsistent throughout the industry.

I know this is a rambling comment, but I thought I could shed a little light and perspective on why so many inconsistencie arise with published recipes. Really, I think it boils down to the fact that cooking in America is mostly without strong style tradition and standardization. We are gradually working in that direction, but the drawback can be that with standardization also comes culinary rigidness and stagnancy. Striking a balance between these competing forces is always a difficult and demanding exercise.