The Most Useful Format Isn’t Always Familiar

What does a recipe look like? If you looked one up in the old pen-and-paper days, there’s a familiar layout: ingredient lists; procedural instructions; a photograph to make your mouth water.

These days, on the internet, the recipe has all those things… and a long, digressive story up top that contextualises how and why the author is writing about and cooking this particular meal.

To the aspiring chefs at the Culinary Institute of America, a recipe is a three-column format. One lays out the timeline for the entire meal, logging what needs to be done when; the second column lists everything they need to produce, and the equipment needed to cook and serve it; the third column breaks down the ingredients needed for each recipe on their docket. (Example 1; Example 2)

It’s the first column that makes the difference, logging everything from prepping ingredients to turning the oven on to gathering equipment for every stage. There’s no space here for instructions hidden in the ingredient list (“wait, these onions were meant to be chopped?”) or unexpectedly necessary utensils (“Jesus, fuck, why didn’t you say we’d need a pastry brush?”).

It looks nothing like the recipes you’re used to, but once you’ve seen one, it’s hard to go back. The flow of cause-and-effect is too clear, the mapping-out of requirements to clean.

But it also takes up space—a precious resource in design for both books and websites—and goes into detail that many first-time cooks may find intimidating. Ergo, the more useful approach gives way to the aesthetically pleasing, less detailed option and the detailed, timesaving layout of the CIA is a piece of secret knowledge shared by the pros. Physical documents that become internalised by the time they graduate into the world.

The most useful way to approach something isn’t always the most popular, especially when the purpose behind the presentation moves from create a useful learning tool to create an aesthetically pleasing book.

(Want to read more about this particular approach? I recommend Dan Charnas’ book about the philosophy and practice of mise-en-place, Everything In Its Place)