Striking the balance between vagueness and detail in cookbooks

August 17, 2024 by
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As someone who does a lot of baking, I prefer my recipes to be precise. Don’t tell me to use ‘half an onion’, instead please give me a measurement (ideally weight, in grams). Restaurant critic Jay Rayner is the opposite: he prefers instructions like ‘a glug of this’ or ‘a splash of that’. However, recently he had to become a “more precise version” of himself because, as he explains, he is writing a cookbook and needs to have recipes that provide enough detail for the intended audience.

Since one of Rayner’s favorite cookbooks is Sam Sifton’s No Recipe Recipes, which has literally no measurements in it, shifting gears to make recipes that had quantifiable measurements was a challenge for Rayner. His cookbook Nights Out at Home (set for release in September in the UK) contains recipes inspired by favorite dishes he enjoyed during 25 years of restaurant reviewing. In most cases he has recreated these recipes without input from the chefs, cooking by intuition until he achieved the result he desired.

Once he did that he had to make the recipes more precise. He turned to Fuchsia Dunlop and other authors for inspiration in striking a balance between vagueness and detail. When he finally landed on the right combination, he came to a conclusion that likened recipe writing to short story writing: “They need a beginning, a middle and an end. They need a strong narrative arc. But most importantly the reader needs to feel they are at the heart of the action. They need to feel empowered.”

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3 Comments

  • averythingcooks  on  August 17, 2024

    I do feel frustration at measurements like “1 red onion” when the ones I grow are fastball (or smaller) size vs the ones I can typically buy locally which are bigger than a softball but my biggest pet peeve lately is coming from some (and no…not all) canning recipes. So many dire warnings about deviating from amts given etc (and as a retired high school senior biology/chemistry teacher I a true understanding of pH & dilution) and then face instructions like “1/2 a red pepper” or “1 yellow onion”. I love books that give masses of “whole veg” needed at the start or a measurement in cups of chopped/sliced/diced veg.

  • Indio32  on  August 18, 2024

    I’ve also noticed that a fair few cookery programmes of late no long include precise measurements for ingredients…. I’m assuming that it’s to push the more profitable spin off cook books.

  • GenieB  on  August 23, 2024

    Recipes that give vague directions like 1 medium onion, chopped, drive me crazy. What’s a medium onion? I have absolutely huge ones (that weigh nearly a pound each) in my onion basket — medium in relation to that kind of onion? Or to the red onions also in the basket?

    I am a very experienced cook and yet I still always wonder if I am using enough or too much with ingredient lists that give vegetables by the each instead of by weight or cups/spoons, etc.

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