For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
How to read a cookbook, or a recipe. I can follow one and hope for the best, or use it it remind myself of details of a dish I’ve made before, but the way most recipes and cookbooks are written is crazy to me. I can’t visualize the final result at all, even with pictures. This is just about the only arena where the video format seems to be better than text, and that’s outrageous.
Why would the amount of something and the instructions for it he in different places? In recipes where you make a dry mix and a wet mix completely separately and then comine them, why aren’t those different subsections? Why in all the hemispheres of the earth is the oven temperature, usually the first thing you have to attend to, not the first line of the recipe?
They’re not written in chronological order or in logistical subsections. I keep having to flip back to the ingredient list to find out how much of something I’ll need (when I’m reading it, I know how to assemble my mise en place, thank you). The best thing I’ve found is to rewrite the whole recipe myself in a way that makes sense to me:
Two columns, one with ingredients and their anounts grouped by subsection and chronologically within that subsection; the second with instructions for what to do with those ingredients. It’s easy for me to tell at a glance, oh, here’s the part I can do in advance, here’s me preparing the Holy Trinity, here’s the spice blend I add midway, here’s the part where I can take a smoke break, here’s the garnish at the end.
PS. Time signatures are all about which dance steps you can do to the music, in my experience.
Two things.
First, that’s just a badly written recipe then. In my experience, no matter how complicated a dish is, it can all fit on a single A4 page at 11pt, maximum two pages.
A recipe shouldn’t say:
“Take a spoon and gently stir the cream for a 2 minutes till it gets a nice and foamy, soft white texture like a cloud on a hot summer day.”
It should say:
“Stirr all the cream until it thickens and sticks to spoon when held upside down.”
That contains all the information you need. What ingredients, how much of it, what to do, and what the result is. Most importantly, they shouldn’t mention time, that’s where people get hung up on and screw up the dish. The pan you use for 15 minutes on your stove with your chosen ingredients isn’t the same as theirs. Especially water content in ingredients can massively change the timing.
Second, a recipe should also assume some knowledge about basic terminology like seared, baked, glazed, steamed, whipped, stirred, etc. They shouldn’t be described in the recipe themselves. If that’s not familiar, video recipes are definetly the better medium to teach recipes. If you watch enough of them, it will be pretty much clear what everything means.
My understanding of the way that recipes are written is that ingredients are put in a list so you know if you have everything you need, or if you need to run to the store). There is no point in trying to make those new brownies if I check my pantry and I am missing the brown sugar and the store is closed.
I do suspect that most people writing recipes are the kind to plan and prepare. Admittedly, it helps for working through the recipe for the purposes of writing it.
The most recent recipe i transcribed was, very much:
It is a sport. You read the recipe and visualize yourself making it. All the while thinking about how to manage time. Repeat that several times before starting. Then prep everything Chops veggies, measure spices, get oven hot, boil water. Whatever. Just have all that going.
Idk there’s sometimes value in having quantities in decreasing order so you aren’t changing measuring devices constantly and for the sake of minimizing clean up.
For me at least, I like to have everything out and ready to go. My wife writes her recipes as inline directions with NO separation and it’s super annoying when you skim it and find “oh shit, I don’t have any peanuts at all in the house.”
The visualization is less about the ingredient quantities and more about the process I think. I DO find it annoying when you’re using the same ingredient two or three times and they’re is no giant, bold HEY DUMMY DONT PUT ALL THE FLOUR IN THE BOWL RESERVE SOME kind of message.
When I write a recipe for myself I do two columns, ingredients on the left and instructions on the right ordered by logical subsections like “peanut sauce”, and “the roast”. I put recipes on index cards, and also like you suggest, across the very top of the card I always write 3 things: 1. Name, 2. Total cooking surstion, and 3. Grill or oven temperature. So I guess we have more or less the same opinion in retrospect!