Talk:Recipe

masochist?

That's fer sure! I'll see tomorrow if I can put any of my own fairly dogmatic ideas into it.... Hayford Peirce 21:46, 2 March 2008 (CST)

Hayford, do Brits really call recipes "receipts"? I've never heard that before. --Larry Sanger 15:35, 3 March 2008 (CST)

I spent 8 months in London in 1968 and never heard it. I have a couple of British "cookery" books and I'm pretty sure that they don't either. It wuz Aleta who wrote the article -- maybe it's a Digger thing.... Hayford Peirce 16:30, 3 March 2008 (CST)

Maybe, but my Oxford Dictionary just says it's 'arch.' Ro Thorpe 16:36, 3 March 2008 (CST)

Was that "archaic", Ro, or "archetypal"? ;)

Haven't you read any British literature, Sanger? And the rest of you? P)

You can put "formerly" if you want, because I haven't lived in England in...mumble...mumble...years, but older folks of a certain class always said "receipt" back in the day.

AND, FYI, I just checked my American dictionary. Definition no. 1 for 'receipt'=(drum roll) "RECIPE"!

Aleta Curry 20:33, 3 March 2008 (CST)

Even a geezer can learn new tricks -- I just checked the only 2 dictionaries I could reach (I'm rebuilding my office and my reference books are scattered around 4 rooms in hard-to-access places) and, to my astonishment, receipt actually means...RECIPE! Even the really majestrial M-W International Unabridged of 1932, second edition, says so. And that's the only book in the world that I actually trust.... So I'll do a rewrite. Mille pardons, chere demoiselle! Hayford Peirce 21:05, 3 March 2008 (CST)

[aside] Anyone who'll call me a 'demoiselle' at this advanced stage of the game gets mille pardons and just about anthing else he wants!

My wife and I went to a (lady) friend's house for New Year's eggnog once and the friend said to me, knowing my birthday was coming up soon, "What do you want for your birthday? I'll give you anything you want. Except *that*!" she added after a moment's thought. "But that's what I *want*!" I said. Hehe.... But ya can't win 'em all.... Hayford Peirce 10:14, 16 March 2008 (CDT)

Can I hire you a cleaning lady to destroy those? --Robert W King 21:13, 3 March 2008 (CST)

Perhaps a reference to receipt may be included? The stub receipt doesn't have any citations either! Supten Sarbadhikari 22:15, 3 March 2008 (CST)

Recipe listing finally underway

Has there been any discussion on how this will be organised? Should recipes be subpages of the article (that is not the case right now)? The reason I wonder this is that there are often regional variations on the same dish? Chris Day (talk) 17:43, 15 March 2008 (CDT)

There's been a gazillion words of discussion about this -- BUT scattered all over the place in what seems to me like a dozen different places. That's why I gave up waiting for anything to be Engraved In Stone and just went ahead and did something. It may be wrong, but at least it's a start. Maybe now that there's something concrete to look at, some of the other people (who have actually shown considerable interest in the project) will get involved again.... Hayford Peirce 18:16, 15 March 2008 (CDT)

I was not suggesting it was wrong just wondered where to chime-in. I guess if I search the forums for recipe i'll find a few of the twelve ;) Chris Day (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2008 (CDT)

No, no, I didn't take it that way -- I didn't express myself clearly. I was just waiting for something to get done. Let's see, we've discussed this at CZ:Recipes and in a *lot* of the catalog areas, I really forget where -- a lot of it was on a sort of ad hoc basis, with the talk petering out in one place and then popping up a month or so later somewhere else. There has also been at least one Proposal, lemme see if I can find it.... Yup, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Recipes_Subpage_and_Accompanying_Usage_Policy#Concrete_Steps_Ahead

I guess I just got tired of waiting. In any case, anything I've done can easily be undone if people come up with a better scheme.... Hayford Peirce 18:49, 15 March 2008 (CDT)

What do you think..

..about splitting the alphabetical list into two lists - one done alphabetically on recipe name, and a separate one that's broken into subcategories (Cocktails, Seafood, Pork, etc)? --Todd Coles 15:17, 16 March 2008 (CDT)

I think that that is probably an excellent idea. I had considered that earlier but it seemed like too much to do before there was enough material to look at and to get an idea of how things were shaping up. Hayford Peirce 17:16, 16 March 2008 (CDT)

I've had second thoughts about this as I do a mental review of some of my key cookbooks. Lemme take a day or so to leaf through the indexes of the best ones and I'll get back to you. In the meantime, we seem to have already put in just about everything relating to recipes that is already to be found in CZ, so I don't think that there is any great urgency about it. I'll let you know what I turn up.... Hayford Peirce 22:49, 16 March 2008 (CDT)

Looks like all is going fine to formalize the Proposal for Recipe subpage formation. Supten Sarbadhikari 05:15, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Indexes, 4 examples

I have before me 4 of my favorite cookbooks, 3 of which are pretty iconic. Three of them not only have a lot of recipes, they are also organized into various sections that attempt to teach you how to cook their particular kind of cuisine, so they are both a list of recipes but a how-to manual. The fourth one, the New York Times one, merely has recipes arranged in various sections such as Appetizers, Soups, Beef, Lamb, Pork, Chicken, Pasta Dishes, Vegetables, Breads, etc.

The 1961 "The New York Times Cook Book" by Craig Claiborne is still in print, I'm pretty sure, and is very well-known. Its index is arranged alphabetically in 3 columns per page. Opening at random, I see:

• Beard, James, punch, 653
• Bearnaise sauce, 446
  • quick, 446
• Bechamel, 443
• Beef
  • boeuf Bourguignon I, 98;
    • , II 98
  • boiled, 94
  • hamburger(s)
    • with dill, 107
    • au poivre, 106
    • potato roll, 107

There don't seem to be any more indentations than what I've shown above. If you look at "Meat(s)", for instance, it doesn't have subcategories for Beef, Lamb, etc. It starts out with "balls, Swedish", followed by "bollito misto". In the Meats list it has "pate", then sub-sub-categories of various kinds of pates. At the very end of the Meat listing it has "see also Beef, Ham, Lamb, Pork, Veal, etc.... And under "Vegetables, 347-412" it says, "See name of vegetable".

The even more iconic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child has:

• bearnaise sauce
• beating
  • definition of
  • of egg whites
    • hand-held electric beater
• bechamel sauce
• beef (boeuf)
  • general information
    • cuts for
      • boiling
      • braising

So her book goes one level deeper, but aside from that it's pretty much the same as the Times index.

Another icon is "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" by Marcella Hazan, also published by Knopf, who did Julia's book. There we find:

• Beard, James
• Bechamel sauce
• beef
  • Bolognese meat sauce
  • braciole
    • filled with cheese and ham
    • stuffed large, Sicilian style

The third of the teaching books is another one published by Knopf, a lesser-known one called "The Key to Chinese Cooking" by Irene Kuo. The indexing is essentially like the others, with a few minor, insignificant differences.

To take Todd's initial question ..about splitting the alphabetical list into two lists - one done alphabetically on recipe name, and a separate one that's broken into subcategories (Cocktails, Seafood, Pork, etc)?, here is what the Times, the most generalized of the four books, has done for each of the items Todd mentions:

It has a single index, beginning with "Age of Innocence Cup, 652", followed by "Allspice, whole, 657", and ending with "Zucchini" (with 7 sub-recipes) and "Zuppa inglese, 572". In between it has both individual recipes mixed up with larger groupings, although always alphabetically. We have, therefore:

• Cloves, whole, 661
  • Cocktails
    • bloody Mary, 648
    • daiquiri, 649
    • etc. etc.
• Coconut
  • Bavarian cream, 591
  • cake, fresh, 551
  • etc, etc.
• Coeur a la creme, 606
• Coffee Bavarian cream, 591
• Colbert butter

For the next item, Seafood, we find:

• Sea bass stuffed with crabmeat, 231
• Sea scallops Seviche, 21
• Seafood
  • bisque, quick, 79
  • in ramekins, 295
  • stew, Italian, 266
• Seckel pears, pickled, 505

It has Fish, Scallops, Lobster, etc. listed in their own sections.

As for Pork, we find:

• Porgy(ies)
  • broiled, 243
  • saute Meuniere, 241
• Pork
  • balls with ginger, 14
  • carnitas, 14
  • Chinese-style, 139
  • chops
    • with basil, 133
    • braised butterfly, 136
    • etc. etc.
• Port and grape jelly, 515

Portuguese chicken, 198

So it looks to me as if we're doing our own indexing exactly like the four books I've cited. I've got another 50 to 100 books, I suppose, but off-hand I don't think we're going to find anything substantially different in them. I would say that the indexing of cookbooks is something that has gradually evolved over time to arrive at some sort of general standard that almost everyone uses. So I don't think that we ought to do anything different after all. We *can*, however, be certain that if we make any mistakes it should be in the way of having too many index items rather than too few. I remember once, years ago, my wife discovered and cooked a superb potato (and anchovies) dish from the New York Times that she absolutely *adored*. Then we had a *terrible* time finding it again a couple of months later in the 700-page book. It was called Janson's temptation and was listed only among the Js, between Jambalaya and Japanese. It was also listed under Anchovies. But it was *not* listed under Potatoes, which was clearly its main ingredient. If we ever have it here in *our* index, I will make certain that is listed in all *three* places, and, who knows?, maybe a fourth entry, "Swedish dishes"....

Sorry to be long-winded about all this, but it's clearly a very important item that, at some point, absolutely has to be set in stone. Please take a deep drink of something refreshing and add your own comments, ideas, suggestions here.... Hayford Peirce 17:17, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

I'm drinking cafe au lait. I wouldn't call it exactly refreshing, in fact it's leaving slime on my tongue, I think, but it's the best I could come up with at 10:55 for something to do while trying to digest all this.

Oooh, how lucky fer me that it's nighttime! I'm drinking the first daiquiri that I've ever made! So-so, my other rum drinks are much better. I've never liked café olé!. But I remember the hurt, astonishment, indignation, and almost anger that my French wife experienced on her first trip to the States when she discovered that if you ordered coffee with milk that it came with a small pitcher of *cold* milk! At first, with her preternatural charm and glowing smile, she would sweettalk restaurants into bringing her hot milk but eventually she gave up....Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Okay, on lists. I'd say one list with just about everything in it, cross-referenced as much as possible. In your Janson's temptation example, Hayford, it doesn't look to me like that's a too many index items problem, rather a not enough index items problem, since it was not listed under "potatoes", or maybe a mistaken index items prob, since the editor obviously had a brain cramp.

I've rewritten that to make it clearer -- I meant to have it the way you have just explained it.Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Just looking over the page at the list we have at recipe, I don't like the idea of indenting in italics "see this, that or the other". To me, the indentation should indicate a sublevel under the topic. So if you want to say Confit de canard See "Confit of Duck" that should be single bullet, alpha order. Right now it looks as if confit de canard is a type of "Coddle", the item currently just above, which it isn't.

I think that's because you don't see enough *other* entries in between them. Eventually there will be *gazillions* of entries and there will be clear separations between the different items referring to the same thing. As for italics, they are only used for foreign terms. I intented all of these cross-referenced items to make it *plain* that they were secondary or third names for the real item. Confit of duck and Coddle will be clearer once they're surrounded by dozens of other entries.Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Ditto that for Cocktails, directly under Cloves in your list above. It looks as though you're saying that these are cocktails made from cloves. That could be a typo, though. Or maybe Bloody Marys are, indeed, supposed to have cloves in them?

That's the New York Times index you're talking about, not mine. But the point is the same -- if you look at the Times index in its *entirety* you see 10,000 items up against the left margin, one of which is cocktails, with its indented 10 cocktail names or so.Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Also, not to be a royal pain in the posterior, but did we ever settle on how, exactly receipts were to be added? Is it to be a subpage, or just in the body of the article? I saw one somewhere with the recipe in a simple box, that worked fine for me. A recipe tab works fine for me (for some reason I can't spell "recipe", I keep getting a spelling error. Lord only knows why I can spell receipt with no problem. But I digress.)

Okay, here's what I suggest (no, we never did decided anything, just the way 99.876% of anything at CZ is never really decided):

• We can call this article Recipes or Recipes:a meta-index or something like that. We then remove *all* the stuff that's currently written above the actual list of recipes and Move it to a *new* article called something like Recipe: the article. Then, *here*, we put in a top line just below the title that reads "For the article that discusses recipes in a general way, see Recipe: the article." So we'd have the meta-list here and the rest of it somewhere else. The exact titles of the articles are, at the moment, to be decided upon....Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

So, yeah--I'm saying just one giant megalist with levels and everything conceivable in it, like the old card catalogue in a library.

Righto, exactly!Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

If you only have Caesar Salad once in your life when you're twelve and can't remember what it was called, you should be able to find it at CZ if you can only remember lettuce, romaine, raw egg, or anchovies.

You must have been reading Julia Child -- she recounts that experience about her First Time at Caesar's restaurant in TiajuanaHayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

(and maybe slime--okay that's wrong--woe betide anyone who ever serves me a slimy Caesar salad, but you get the point)

Aleta Curry 19:13, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Most Caesar's these days are pretty slimy in the sense that they are simple doused with a bottle of premixed stuff. The original version, if perfectly made, *also* has a certain slime factor because of the raw egg being used, but even as a 14-y/o that didn't bother me -- I simply didn't like the taste very much.... Hayford Peirce 21:41, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

Wow.. I feel as if I write anything short of a novella I'm not trying hard enough. Hayford, thanks for the research, after reading that I agree that we should continue as we have been. I also agree that I'd rather error in favor of too much indexing as opposed to too little, but I think we need to do this within reason. For example, with the salad example, I don't think you put a garden salad under salad, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. or this list is going to grow to gargantuan proportions. I find it hard to believe someone trying to remember what kind of salad they had would be looking under cucumber to find it. I think we should try to stick to main ingredients.

As far as the indents go, I agree with Aleta - but I'm willing to ride that one out for awhile and see if it becomes more clear to me as the list grows.

And as far as decisions on recipes and what not, I think we all should take the time to revisit the proposal page, wherever it is, and see where it stands there. I gather from an above post that Supten is ready to push this on to whatever administrative body needs to pass this thing through. --Todd Coles 22:09, 17 March 2008 (CDT)