How to Write a Recipe, Part I: Ingredients
When I went to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I took a class on financial reporting that required us to write earnings stories — the “Starbucks stock is up a penny” kind of thing. Once we memorized the general format of these reports, we could read a company earning statement, pull out the relative information, and know how to share it in a short paragraph without too much fuss. These reports tend to be so formulaic that several years ago, a company made waves for creating AI to write them instead of people.
Recipes are the technical writing of the food world. They need an easy-to-understand order, and each thing in that order needs to be clear. All good recipes have one thing in common: they are written in such a way that a variety of people can follow them and get good results. But since the best ones come from someone who has cooked and tasted the dish, here’s hoping recipe writing doesn’t go the way of AI quite as fast as earnings reports
Sounds obvious, but it can get tricky. Do you say “1 potato, peeled and cubed,” or “1 cup peeled and cubed potatoes”? Well, it depends. I won’t go into the nitty gritty of that in this post, but just know that if you’ve never written a recipe before, you will ask yourself a lot of questions like that.
The more you write them, though, the more efficient you’ll become. All this stuff comes with practice. And you can always re-write recipes to make them better.
Also true: If you have a draft of a recipe but you’re missing the yield (“makes 12 muffins; serves 4 to 6”) or an ingredient quantity (1 cup apple cider vinegar), you’ll have to re-make the recipe to collect that information.
So in this post, I’m focusing on the fundamentals of the ingredient list, including the order of components in an average recipe so you can ensure you’re collecting the right stuff and organizing it in a standard way. For more on the rest of the recipe, see this post on instructions.
And if you happen to have a question about recipes in general, leave a voice recording for our podcast, Everything Cookbooks, and we will try to answer in future episodes.
In this post, I cover the general order of a standard recipe, from title to instructions, plus add tips for how to write ingredients clearly.
Title: All recipes need a title, even if it’s something as simple as “Chicken Marinade.” Name it something that gives us a clue about what we can expect in the recipe. Don’t make it as long as dish listed at a fancy restaurant, but be descriptive. “Roasted Carrot Salad with Spiced Walnuts” is simple but effective.
Tip: Avoid too many “Joe’s Famous Chili” unless it’s clear from the context of the book or blog or article who Joe is. If you have to include Joe in there, it’s better to say “Joe’s Famous Cincinnati-Style Chili.”
Yield: This can come right after the title and before the headnote or after the headnote. Be consistent with yields if this is a book. Either say “Makes x servings” or “Yield: x servings,” but don’t mix and match styles in a series of recipes. If it’s not about servings but instead about volume, you can say “Makes 3 cups” or “Yield: 3 cups.” You can even put it in metric: “Yield: 3 cups [720 ml]” —just be consistent in whatever structure you select for your recipes.
Headnote: Ensure it relates to the title. Here are some writing prompts to help craft better headnotes.
Ingredients: The ingredient list and instructions that follow need to be in sync with each other. In other words, there should never be something in the ingredient list that is not mentioned in the instructions, and vice versa. But it’s easy to miss something, so always give a recipe a second, third, or fourth read to make sure everything is accounted for.
Tip: If you’re working in Microsoft Word and want to avoid scrolling up and down while proofreading a recipe is to use the split screen view—go to “Window,” then “split.” That way you can have the ingredients section and the instructions section on the same screen! This is a game changer! (At least for me.)
Also, organize the list of ingredients by the order in which they appear in the instructions. If you add a lot of ingredients in the same step, list the largest quantity first. If it’s a bunch of spices, say, have the 1 tablespoon paprika first, followed by 1 teaspoon ground cumin, then 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes last. Just remember largest quantity to smallest if they’re all being added in the same step.
For salt and pepper, write them on separate lines. Bonus points for putting measurements on these and specifying “kosher salt” and “ground black pepper. And put them in the order in which they are used (they don’t have to be listed together). If you use salt in a couple of places, list it where it is first used. So if you have a pound of salmon that you season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and rub with olive oil at the beginning of the recipe, list the salt after the salmon, even if all of it isn’t being used at the beginning. That can be cleared up in the instructions.
1 pound skin-on salmon fillet
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon olive oil
Tip: Some people like to write “1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided” if the salt will be used in multiple places. If you prefer to write it that way, be consistent for all recipes that require a “divided” measurement. It may not always apply to salt.
Writing recipes is a skill you learn over time, and while this post only scratches the surface, this out-of-print book goes much deeper. If you’re trying to write a recipe and are stumped on how to explain something, flip through some favorite books and see how they described the process. Dissect the words they used. Don’t copy them, but use the example to think through how that author got to that point.
The takeaway: In the first draft, get down more details than you will probably need. It’s better to document yields and ingredient quantities in a rough form when you’re not familiar with recipe writing than to ignore them. When redrafting, think about consistency. Don’t jump from spelling out teaspoons to abbreviating tsp in the ingredients list. Remember if you have all the relevant info, it will be easier to edit the recipe without having to make it over and over again.
And another note: many authors have successfully broken the mold I’ve spelled out above. But you can’t break the mold if you don’t understand what it is in the first place. It’s like what Michael Jordan said—it’s all about the fundamentals. In basketball, and, I suppose, in recipes.