How to cut an onion? Let me count the ways. I can chop, slice, segment, sliver or dice. I can cut finely, coarsely or roughly. But how thick is a wedge? It’s enough to make the eyes water. Until I came to write my first recipe, it seemed an easy enough business, but the art of recipe writing is fiendishly tricky.
Home cooks divide into two groups: those who use recipes as mere suggestions or guidelines, and those who follow instructions as if they were sat-nav systems. As one who has sweated over the difference between “gentle boil” and “lively simmer” on the reader’s behalf, I’d like to request that everyone follows the recipe as written, if only once. At the same time, I issue a disclaimer: if it smells like it’s burning, then it probably is.
For centuries, most recipes were aides-mémoire for skilled cooks, complicated records of a masterly culinary career or books of medicinal lore. One of the earliest printed books was The Boke of Kervynge (1508) which includes glorious carving commands such as “Thigh That Pigeon and Disfigure That Peacock”.
‘Bruise one small anchovy’
Water-cress
“Water-cress pottage is a good remedy to cleanse the blood in the spring, and help headaches, and consume the gross humours winter has left behind; those that would live in health, may use it if they please; if they will not, I cannot help it. If any fancy not pottage, they may eat the herb as sallad.”
From ‘The Compleat Herbal’ by Dr Nicholas Culpeper (1653)Buttered turnips
“Some roast Turnips in a Paper under the Embers and eat them with Sugar and Butter.”
From ‘Acetaria or a Discourse on Sallets’ (1706) by John EvelynOyster toast à la Sir John Bailey
“Bruise one small anchovy in a mortar fine, take a score of oysters, natives or Hampshire Royals, best, and cast off their beards. Chop the oysters up fine, put anchovy and oysters into a small saucepan. Mix both together with sufficient cream to give it a pleasing consistency.
Heat it well over the fire, stirring it all the time. Spread it on a round of buttered toast, baked crisp and crust cast off. Serve it up hot in slices. Eat in solemn silence and wash down with a glass of brown sherry.”
From ‘London At Table’ (1851)
Cookery books made the transition from celebrity memoir to practical and detailed manuals with the publication in 1747 of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a then little-known Hannah Glasse, a woman whose recipes are written in blunt, everyday language for simple souls.
By the 19th century, driven by greater literacy and the urge to catalogue the world, many cookbooks had morphed into compendia of household management. For the user-reader, the emphasis changed from hazy estimation to imperial directive. Dr William Kitchiner, scientist and bon viveur, in The Cook’s Oracle (1816) bade farewell to “the rule of thumb” and gave exact measurements, as well as their order of use. He boasted: “The Author has submitted to a labour no preceding Cookery-book-maker, perhaps, ever attempted to encounter – having eaten each Receipt before he set it down in his book.”
Kitchiner’s ideas were taken on by others, including Eliza Acton, author of Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), who introduced an ingredients list after the recipe. Mrs Beeton then placed the ingredients before the method, adding information about time, average cost, number served and seasonality – and so introduced the format that prevails today.
During the second half of the 20th century, recipe instructions became increasingly formulaic and dictatorial. Rosemary Stark, who has been a food editor and writer on many publications, recalls that by the 1970s, the dominant influence on recipe writing was the style of “ferocious women at Reader’s Digest who measured salt to an eighth of a teaspoon and did their recipes in numbered steps”.
Since then, we have moved away from this inflexible approach, and many more people now use an informal “dollop and drizzle” approach to following recipes. This casual style infuriates recipe hunters like me, who need to know whether a “fistful” is a precise measure or just “intuition”.
The great cookery writer Elizabeth David understood that a good recipe offered a happy medium between too vague and too prescriptive. Like her heroine Eliza Acton, David was illuminating and concise, never omitting the tiny detail that makes all the difference. In the hands of other literary cookery writers such as Patience Grey, a recipe can also be a work of art.
So what makes a recipe good or bad? According to Stark: “It should be enticing without ever compromising accuracy, clarity and simplicity.” Poor recipes are muddling or careless: ingredients used must actually be listed or, if listed, used, and the reader never ambushed by a surprise instruction to whip the egg whites while frying the potatoes. Details matter, says Stark. “Spot the difference between 500g apples, peeled, quartered and cored, and 500g peeled, quartered and cored apples. It matters about a quarter of the weight.”
In the run-up to Christmas, books by chefs will be piled high in the bookshops. Stark is critical of this trend as it may not help the home cook: “Chef methodology is different, everything is prepped for them so they refer to spoonfuls not numbers of carrots, ovens are hotter, they use multiple pans or heat the oven to finish steak for five minutes.”
Stark is also eagle-eyed on lazy writing. “I don’t like ‘season to taste’ – how else would you do it? And ‘serve with a crisp, fresh salad’ – as opposed to a limp, stale one? I can’t bear words such as ‘crispy’, ‘crunchy’ and ‘tasty’.
“And ‘pan-fried’ is hateful! What else would you fry it in? A kettle?”
