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?”
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.