recipe mistakes
you guys are hearing from me twice this week because i have a bee in my bonnet
Last semester, the head of the culinary department chided me for cooking at home with recipes off the internet, instead of a cookbook, or obviously one of the standardized recipes she worked so hard to develop for us. (Because there are generational issues in this post, I am 42, and she is, in her words—and my mind!—ageless.) It got me thinking about the reliability of cookbooks vs. online sources. I recently came across a celebrated cookbook with a multi-page errata sheet—is this regular?? One benefit of a blog is that at least it can be updated!
If one spends enough time looking at online recipes, I don't feel that it is impossible to figure out—there are recipe writers who publish reliable work, and those who are hit-and-miss. Some of the trustworthy ones have more journalistic backgrounds, like
or . Plenty come from a range of other backgrounds, including entirely self-taught—and they are putting out thorough and generous work on a schedule that is sustainable.With writers of every level of success, you can also tell if they are putting out something that is aspirational, either skill-wise (if you had done that before, you wouldn't tell me to do it in 5 minutes), or in the schedule that the work is getting churned out on. I sympathize to some extent with both—it’s a job and the issue is capitalism! But I’m also sometimes filled with incapacitating rage at the attention or money that goes towards work that isn't great—especially when it is work that could make the home cook feel bad about themself (or worse).
As a recipe tester, I'd like to blame you all for not paying your recipe testers. It's been interesting to see how, similarly to restaurant tipping, projects with smaller budgets pay more. I was moved by
paying me and her other zine recipe testers $100, plus ingredients, per recipe. I feel grateful for much of the free work I have done—especially for friends, or people who would likewise go out of their way for me. But do I feel weird about having done years of free recipe testing for a blog, after its multiple James Beard awards? Kind of?Reading up on this topic, I learned about multiple “Cakegates,” with the first edition of the River Café Cook Book, and then with Nigella’s Feast. In the first example, Rose Gray actually doubled down on the recipe and said, “It is a sort of challenging cake. … It’s a recipe you need to make a couple of times before you get it right.” With regards to her Lemon Buttermilk Cake, Maida Heatter blamed “demons.”
Marion Kane shares an interesting take from Alison Fryer:
She describes the incidence of mistakes in cookbooks as a cycle that’s gone in waves.
“In the early to mid-‘80s, recipes weren’t tested as well,” she says citing the famous Silver Palate cookbooks as “a classic example of caterers writing a cookbook.” She mentions “some of the cookie recipes where reducing large to small quantities just didn’t work.”
During that era, she reckons 30 to 35 per cent of cookbook recipes did not work.
In the 1990s, she explains, “We moved into a phase when cookbooks were more painstakingly edited. Recipes were well-tested and the number of mistakes dropped to about 10 per cent.”
She insists there’s a “methodology for recipe-testing and most cookbook writers had begun to understand this concept.” Also, “Publishers didn’t want to make changes when a book was re-printed.”
At the end of that decade, however, there was a new hazard.
“With the rise of technology, we see that not all word-processing programs are created equal,” she adds. The result: “Lines would be dropped. Things that should have been a tablespoon became a teaspoon – fractional measurements have long been a problem.”
Happily, says Fryer, “We’re back up to about 20 per cent.” Not so happily, she notes, “We Canadians tend to blame ourselves first when a recipe doesn’t work.”
Further reading (from most recent):
’s “On the Recipe As Object”’s “Realizing (and paying for) a zine dream”’s “Why cookbooks aren't always as reliable as they should be”Mayukh Sen’s “Where Most Best-Selling Cookbooks Go Wrong”
’s “When a Reader Found a Cookbook Error”’s “The Truth Behind Cookbook Recipes”Felicity Cloake’s “Cookbook errors: recipes for disaster”
Rachel Cooke’s “Why there's more to cookbooks than recipes”
Marion Kane’s “Recipe Mistakes can be Serious”
Tom Norrington-Davies’s “Let them eat butterless cake”
Marian Burros’s “Cookbook Follies: Recipes That Fail”
I always read the comments on online recipes before making it to try and catch errors, omissions, or just plain, "this doesn't work". NYT app is particularly rich in commentary.
I wrote to a cookbook author when following one of her cake recipes yielded easily three times too much cake batter for the pans she called for. She wrote me back to tell me I was wrong, and that I must have done something wrong, but I did the math and her ingredients added up to many times the volume the pans could hold. So frustrating!