Recipes – how to use them
Probably the most important thing to know about recipes is that you should read the whole thing first. That’s because the list of ingredients most recipes start out with isn’t always complete, and there may be additional ingredients lurking farther down in the text. Sometimes vital information might be missing, like how long to cook it, or even how (oven, microwave, frying pan?) Or, maybe it requires a tool you don’t have, or an ingredient you can’t get in your area.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules on the way a recipe should be written, so even cook books have the occasional mistake, or are set up in a way that’s difficult to use. Recipes in newspapers and/or general interest publications are known for their high rate of bloopers because their copy editors aren’t always cooks, so some BIG mistakes can get by them.
Only a couple of weeks back, our local newspaper printed some recipes for local specialties that were pretty much useless to the local readership, since all the amounts were in metric. (Cooking in metric is a whole different ballgame!)
There is a relatively easy way to check if the recipe you’ve got is actually wrong, if you’re suspicious. Plug in the kind of thing it is into your favorite search engine, like this:
Chicken soup recipe
And you will get a zillion others to compare it with.
If you want to get a good, basic cookbook that has been meticulously checked for errors, and also gives plenty of backup info, the Joy of Cooking is still the best choice. I’m on my third copy! The hard cover edition holds together the best – about 8-10 years in my experience. They also have a version on CD, which I haven’t tried, but I’m considering.
Have you got a strange recipe you’d like to try but don’t know if it works? Ask me about it in the comments section.
