Recipe Bloopers

[heidih]

Today's on Food52 for crispy sesame shrimp is ridiculous:  "3 teaspoons white sesame seeds, untested"  I know it is untoasted but??? It jumps off the page at first read

[AlaMoi]

the replacement of editors with spell check and auto-correct is not working out well.

[weinoo]

17 minutes ago, AlaMoi said:

the replacement of editors with spell check and auto-correct is not working out well.

 

Exactly. Sometimes they even miss words at the beginning of a sentence; you know, the ones which ought to be capitalized.

[Margaret Pilgrim]

How much of print prose is now dictated and manufactured by the “machine”?    Homophones and “mis-heards” are deadly.   To say nothing I of the idiot who second guesses my every keystroke on the iPhone.

[heidih]

What I also do not get are things like duplicate words such as "and and" and "of" instead of "or". Those are just annoying but show me a lack of care. I'm to trust your recipe but you don't care enough to edit. Plus most programs catch that basic nonsense and flag it. You still need human eyes to verify. In my opening post I knew what was meant, but a novice might not. That bothers me too. 

Edited August 12, 2021 by heidih (log)

[AlaMoi]

recipe write ups with "OMG" quantities / procedures / steps . . . . I simply disregard / toss / click-on-by.

if it doesn't sound right, it probably isn't right.

 

to wit - did a Thomas Keller lemon marinated/soaked chicken.

a marinade of five lemons set my spider senses off  . .

and I was right....

it was inedible.

[Kim Shook]

4 hours ago, AlaMoi said:

recipe write ups with "OMG" quantities / procedures / steps . . . . I simply disregard / toss / click-on-by.

if it doesn't sound right, it probably isn't right.

 

to wit - did a Thomas Keller lemon marinated/soaked chicken.

a marinade of five lemons set my spider senses off  . .

and I was right....

it was inedible.

Had the same thing happen to me with an Emeril recipe and lemons.  They were used whole - including the pith.  I thought it was odd, but went ahead.  Yep.  Inedible.  

[mgaretz]

Back when I was really learning to cook, the first recipe I made for my daughter was a Thai basil chicken from Sunset magazine.  It came out great but when I went to make it again, I discovered that it called for chicken stock in the list of ingredients, but was nowhere in the instructions.  I emailed them about it and they had no answer.  I must have added it at the right time by accident.

[Smithy]

On 8/13/2021 at 1:35 AM, mgaretz said:

Back when I was really learning to cook, the first recipe I made for my daughter was a Thai basil chicken from Sunset magazine.  It came out great but when I went to make it again, I discovered that it called for chicken stock in the list of ingredients, but was nowhere in the instructions.  I emailed them about it and they had no answer.  I must have added it at the right time by accident.

 

I tried baking my first (and only) carrot cake from a cookbook put together by respected, published bakers. The recipe never said when to add the shredded carrot! I must have guessed correctly because it came out all right, but it was still startling. Never heard back from that publisher, either. 

[Wait. Wot]

Decades ago I had "The Encyclopedia of Chinese Cooking". It listed the ingredients before the instructions and prepended letters in sequence to each. The instructions referenced the ingredients by their prepended letter.

 

One recipe had this (or something like this) instruction: rinse K well and set aside. Ingredient K was not mentioned again in the instructions which was probably just as well. Ingredient K was sugar.

 

[Tropicalsenior]

On 10/3/2021 at 9:02 AM, Wait. Wot said:

Decades ago I had "The Encyclopedia of Chinese Cooking". It listed the ingredients before the instructions and prepended letters in sequence to each. The instructions referenced the ingredients by their prepended letter.

 

One recipe had this (or something like this) instruction: rinse K well and set aside. Ingredient K was not mentioned again in the instructions which was probably just as well. Ingredient K was sugar.

 

I had that exact same cookbook. The most frustrating cookbook I ever saw in my life. I never ran across that recipe which is a good thing because I don't know how you can rinse sugar. At the time that I had that cookbook we were living right on the Pacific Ocean in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. Between the salt air and a leak in the roof some of my cookbooks got ruined. I didn't shed any tears over that one.

[liuzhou]

 

6 minutes ago, Tropicalsenior said:

because I don't know how you can rinse sugar

 

I know how to rinse sugar!

[Tropicalsenior]

Just now, liuzhou said:

 

 

I know how to rinse sugar!

I'll probably never do it but I'd sure like to know how. I had no idea there was such a process or even a need for it. How is it used in Chinese cooking?

[liuzhou]

1 hour ago, Tropicalsenior said:

I'll probably never do it but I'd sure like to know how. I had no idea there was such a process or even a need for it. How is it used in Chinese cooking?

 

I haven't seen the cookbook you are referencing, so this is a guess, but hopefully an educated one!

 

They are probably talking about rock sugar - the most common type here - and people do rinse that to get rid of any dust or worse it may have picked up during processing, handling and distribution etc. I wrote about sugar in China a while back in this topic.

Rock Sugar

From your accounts, the cookbook certainly seems badly written, but not necessarily wrong.

Edited December 8, 2021 by liuzhou (log)

[Tropicalsenior]

6 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

From your accounts, the cookbook certainly seems badly written, but not necessarily wrong.

Thank you. Rock sugar didn't even enter my mind.

Neither of us has said that the cookbook was bad, just poorly formatted. As she said, all the ingredients were listed using letters and the ingredients were added according to letter not name. You had to keep referring back to the ingredient list to see what you were going to add next. Some of the recipes had up to 20 ingredients and you felt that you were going blind by the time that you added them all. The only way that I could use it was to copy out the recipe using the standard format.

It was a shame because it was a very informative book. It definitely wasn't a book for a novice cook or one with little patience. Unfortunately the latter category describes me to a T.

[liuzhou]

3 hours ago, Tropicalsenior said:

Neither of us has said that the cookbook was bad, just poorly formatted.

 

Yes, but that is typical of many Chinese language cookbooks. I suspect that this was a translation from one of them. They tend to be poorly formatted and skimpy with instructions.

 

But remember please, English language cookbooks were the same not that long ago. Writers assumed a lot of prior knowledge.

[Tropicalsenior]

5 hours ago, liuzhou said:

But remember please, English language cookbooks were the same not that long ago. Writers assumed a lot of prior knowledge.

Since this is the subject near and dear to my heart, I decided that if I wanted to pursue this I had better start another topic before we got kicked from this one

[ElsieD]

I just found this topic this morning.  Coincidentally I was looking for a recipe for asparagus tart when I found one, posted by a major grocery chain (Loblaws).  This recipe was in English, until I came to this line:

 

1/2 cup (125ml) de cheddar, fort, râpé.

[paulraphael]

This is less a problem with recipes than with playing telephone ... 

 

When my mom was newly married, in the 1950s, when a woman's entire value to the universe hinged on knowing how to cook (which she didn't), she survived by way of desperate phone calls to her best friend to get instructions. 

 

One day the recipe she wrote down included "clives."

 

There were no clives in the kitchen.

 

She ran all over Manhattan looking for them.

 

One grocer after another said, "no, we don't have those."

 

Not one grocery professional did her the courtesy of saying, "lady, there's no such thing."

 

I have no idea how she managed to save dinner.

 

Whenever I go home for the holidays now I find a random jar in the pantry and label it CLIVES.

Edited December 9, 2021 by paulraphael (log)

[Katie Meadow]

5 minutes ago, paulraphael said:

This is less a problem with recipes than with playing telephone ... 

 

When my mom was newly married, in the 1950s, when a woman's entire value to the universe hinged on knowing how to cook (which she didn't), she survived by way of desperate phone calls to her best friend to get instructions. 

 

One day the recipe she wrote down included "clives."

 

There were no clives in the kitchen.

 

She ran all over Manhattan looking for them.

 

One grocer after another said, "no, we don't have those."

 

Not one grocery professional did her the courtesy of saying, "lady, there's no such thing."

 

I have no idea how she managed to save dinner.

 

Whenever I go home for the holidays now I find a random jar in the pantry and label it CLIVES.

Okay, labeling a mysterious jar CLIVES is hilarious. How long do you plan on keeping it? And what do you think the recipe really called for? Cloves or chives or olives?

[Tropicalsenior]

2 hours ago, Katie Meadow said:

And what do you think the recipe really called for? Cloves or chives or olives?

If she got the recipe verbally from a friend I would go for Chives.

[paulraphael]

5 hours ago, Katie Meadow said:

And what do you think the recipe really called for? Cloves or chives or olives?

 

No one even remembers what she was trying to cook. The answer is lost forever.

 

Edited to add ... I never even thought of olives!

Edited December 9, 2021 by paulraphael (log)

[chromedome]

56 minutes ago, paulraphael said:

 

No one even remembers what she was trying to cook. The answer is lost forever.

 

Edited to add ... I never even thought of olives!

Funny how our minds work, isn't it? I was the opposite; I went straight to "olives" and never would have thought of cloves or chives.

[heidih]

4 minutes ago, chromedome said:

Funny how our minds work, isn't it? I was the opposite; I went straight to "olives" and never would have thought of cloves or chives.

And my only thought was chives as cloves plural made little sense and olives - in the day - over the phone  = did not seem the conveying word.

[chromedome]

59 minutes ago, heidih said:

And my only thought was chives as cloves plural made little sense and olives - in the day - over the phone  = did not seem the conveying word.

For me it wasn't the over-the-phone part, but the hastily-scrawled part. A partial O is automatically a C.

 

I've done this more than once to myself, and my printed lower-case Rs, Ns, Us and Vs all look pretty much alike.