Recipe writing
A set of written instructions used to prepare a dish. Something that in theory should be straightforward to follow.
This is possibly a bold statement to make but recipe writing (particularly for those of us who are neurodivergent) is awful.
For years I have endured the traditional way recipes are written. Getting frustrated every time my eyes have to repeatedly dart across the page in a cookbook, searching a third time for the quantity of an ingredient that it would never occur to me to prepare in advance (who has the time or endless supply of ramekins?!). Or having to refer to the ingredients again to confirm whether the onion needs to be chopped or sliced. Heaven forbid if the instructions span two pages and I have to keep turning the page with floury fingers to remember how long or how many times to I have to prove my hot cross bun dough. I’ve only made them once because of it.
Established food writers churn out books and online recipes. All the recipes follow the same, painful to follow and often (for people with messy brains) indecipherable format. A list of ingredients, prep helpfully described and then a long passage of text to guide us through to completion. The hope is that we’ll create the same aesthetically pleasing, perfectly styled and photographed end product that it’s taken an entire team to make. And if there’s no picture I don’t bother.
Then there are the content creators, who create recipes at an alarming rate to produce recipes we occasionally save to never make one day. Many of whom fill their blogs with so many adverts I close my browser tab out of annoyance before I even have the opportunity to endure a backstory about someone’s foraging grandma. I find the recipe elsewhere, my brain overwhelmed with irritating, ever changing information.
In many cases, there’s a whole production team to make a video of a chef orgasmically eating a forkful of whatever they’ve effortlessly cooked, a trend I cannot get on board with but something a huge amount of effort has gone into.
All of this effort but we can’t write a more straightforward set of instructions to make everyone’s life easier?