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Husb2Sparkly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Wed Aug-27-08 09:40 AMOriginal messageI have a pet peeve about how recipes are presented ...... Why do they use such clipped and stilted language?"Add 1C sugar to mixture"Why not the more prosaic "Add one cup of sugar to the mixture you just created"?Yes, it is wordier. So what?I can understand hand written recipes being clipped. But printed recipes?What's the point?
Warpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Wed Aug-27-08 09:57 AMResponse to Original message1. Perhaps when the average non cook is standing amidst a disaster in the kitchen, drips running down the cabinet and a fine haze of flour wafting through the air, the fewer words the better.I grew up watching a non cook struggle daily with getting something non poisonous onto the dinner table.
supernova Donating Member (1000+ posts) Wed Aug-27-08 10:01 AMResponse to Original message2. Wow, trivia payload! H2S, you asked the question of the day. I found a really good and long article on the history of the recipe over at About.com. Some highlights:The form of a recipe has been broadly consistent for thousands of years, although older recipes usually provide less detail because cooks had command of the techniques, which tended to be less demanding. The ancient Greek cookery writer Philoxenus of Leucas wrote, "For the casserole is not bad, though I think the frying-pan better." Elsewhere he advised, "The wriggling polyp, if it be rather large, is much better boiled than baked, if you beat it until it is tender" (Athenaeus, vol. 1, 1927, pp. 21, 23). If these are typical, they help explain why the vast gastronomic compilation The Deipnosophists (Philosophers of dinner) made by Athenaeus about 1,800 years ago includes so few recognizable recipes. Philoxenus's advice presumably helped with novel foods in the flourishing Greek marketplace.....While recipes seem to promise the whole world of cooking, there is pressure to rely on a standard repertoire of techniques. Successful recipe writers are advised to restrict themselves to readily available ingredients. Recipe-based cooking favors smart-seeming compositions over untouched foods, however excellent.....Written recipes are presumably as old as literacy, which emerged to control food supplies in the earliest civilizations. Recorded instructions had the advantages of wide and accurate transmission and archival retrieval. The power of naming, discussing, and borrowing was reserved to the tiny literate elite for thousands of years, contributing to the separation of high cooking, investigated by the social anthropologist Jack Goody in Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (1982).....In medieval English manuscripts, numerous sentences begin "Tak wyte wyn" (Take white wine) and "Tak partrichys rostyd" (Take roasted partridges). Others instruct "Nym water" and "Nym swete mylk," using the archaic "nim" (or "nym"), which means "take." Yet others start "Recipe brede gratyd, & eggis" (Take grated bread and eggs), borrowing the Latin verb recipere (to take). Medieval recipes generally did not include measurements and times, providing a challenge for modern interpreters, who often are divided over how spicy the original dishes tasted.I've always noticed how similar recipes look to your average chemistry lab report. I guess the answer is that you wanted to be specific without being so technical or precise, except in baking, that someone else couldn't follow your instructions.
hippywife Donating Member (1000+ posts) Wed Aug-27-08 12:08 PMResponse to Original message3. But, but, but... if you can print it, that means someone had to type it.
What. An. Idiot.I mean, seriously. He's complaining about the brevity of language used in RECIPES???????
Quote from: Flame on August 27, 2008, 11:35:22 AMWhat. An. Idiot.I mean, seriously. He's complaining about the brevity of language used in RECIPES??????? I suspect it's Freudian in nature; actually, the sparkling husband primitive's probably complaining about the brevity of instructions given by the wife while the two are in bed.
