Visual Representations of Recipes

Most recipes these days are presented using minor variations on a popular theme: a list of ingredients followed by a list of instructions.

Check out this tabular form for banana bread:

Cooking for Engineers

What I like is that it is easy to see the relationship between the ingredients and the role each ingredient plays throughout the process. Since I discovered this site, I have mapped out a few recipes in this form and find it really useful. You get an immediate grand view of the entire creation. The only thing I don't like is that the directions are vertically oriented, but my odd brain seems to handle this.

Speaking of odd brains, the left-brain/right brain explanation of how we handle verbal and graphical representations may play a role. Except for people like me whose brain dominance is completely scrambled: write with my left hand, throw with my right arm, kick with both legs, left eye dominant, right ear dominant... Perhaps that is why I find tabular recipes so appealing and others will find it confusing.

The absolutely worst way I've ever seen recipes layed out is Diana Kennedy's "The Cuisines of Mexico", which also has some of the best Mexican recipes you will ever find. She lists a few ingredients, and then to the side lists the steps for those ingredients. Then the next group of ingredients and the steps for those and so on. Harder for my odd brain to follow than others ways.

Bill/SFNM

Bill,

You don't need a brain. You're a natural from what I've read.

I like the representation of ingredients with cooking for engineers, but in some cases that representation fails to tell you, clearly, what to do with a specific set of ingredients. I've seen some where all it says about a particular group of ingredients is "saute". I think I've even seen some where it just says "cook". It's miserable.

They seem to have gotten better since I first checked them out, though. But adding in all the supporting text kind of eliminates, for me, the usefulness of the little box thingy.