On Recipes

I’ve noticed as I’ve read more recipes and tried a few new things that there’s something a bit archaic about how recipes are written. Recipes in books and magazines, but especially on-line, tend to have a very similar format: an ingredient list up-front, followed by the sequence of tasks which detail how to make the dish.

This is fine when the ingredients are few and the preparation is simple, but as the number of different ingredients grows and the dish becomes more elaborate, it feels strenuous and sometimes confusing to look back and forth between the step that you’re on and the ingredient(s) of interest. Mercifully, ingredients are traditionally listed in the order that they are used, but this is still just a relative ordering and not especially useful for helping you locate what you need during any given step.

A dozen ingredients and five steps doesn’t seem like too much, but try keeping track of them with your smartphone while you’re cooking. You might object that a smartphone is the wrong tool for this job, but it highlights my point precisely: you need both the ingredients and the instructions that deal with those ingredients at the same time. Why not present them together so you have all the information at hand? This could, in fact, be accomplished with a magical typographic device that has only been around for literally hundreds and hundreds of years: multiple columns.

Multiple columns not only place the ingredients adjacent to the instructions so that you can easily move back and forth between the two, if a little extra effort is used, the ingredients could be placed exactly across from the step in which they are used, making it even clearer.

Using a “sequential” recipe layout feels like having to rewind and fast-forward a VHS tape, whereas a “parallel” recipe layout feels much more like reading a good map.