What Can Writer/Publishers Learn From Recipe Formatting?

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. (Example 1; Example 2)

One column 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.

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.

Here’s the thing: I’m a writer and a publisher. Producing aesthetically pleasing books is kinda my thing, but I’m very conscious of the limitations that come with that.

If you’re trying to write books about writing, for example, the aesthetics and standards of the publishing industry shape the eventual output.

Books are ‘meant’ to be a certain length—usually 200 to 350 pages—in order to be commercially successful.

Books are ‘meant’ to follow a certain structure, and they should be aimed at new beginners (because there’s more aspiring writers to buy it than established writers).

When you’re selling books into bookstores, working at velocity, selling to aspiring writers makes sense because you need numbers to mitigate your print costs.

A velocity publisher—ideally—needs to clear at least two-thirds of their print run within a month of release.

A nice approach if you can make it work, but it shapes the way we talk about writing. It changes what can be accomplished.

So, I sometimes force myself to think about the three column recipe format, and ask myself how I want to present ideas.

What happens if we let books be shorter?

What happens if I produce short, cheap essays on very specific niches?

What happens if we don’t aim the book at writers just starting out?

Which is how I end up producing the GenrePunk Ninja essay series and the Writer Chaps series over at Brain Jar Press. Trying to break my own assumptions about what a book ‘should’ look like and try something new.

It’s not the right format for everyone, but I’m also not a velocity publisher. I take my time finding an audience for books and connecting them with the right readers.

They’re there just in case someone needs them in that format, and I can build longer books out of those parts for the folks who absolutely need a 200 page paperback to feel like they’re reading a book.

There’s not one way to write a recipe anymore, and it opens up what you can do as a writer and publisher.

And it’s one of the things I love most about publishing right now.