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Comment by emj | Hacker News Reader

The problem is while recipes are facts and can be freely spread, prose about how to make cookies is copyrighted. So you get lots of recipes but the important instructions are losts, and people get used to the idea that a recipe is just ingredients and easy to follow steps. The results is lots of recipes that are pretty easy follow, but as always when a design meets a user someone is going to misinterpret your fool proof design. So good simple recipes is a lot like UX when the needs are simple. Think: Recorder app vs. Audacity.

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My wife and I always hate reading recipes online. We finally spent like $50 and bought three of the most amazing cookbooks. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which explains how cooking works, Food Lab, and America’s Test Kitchen.

I made a baked potato with a perfect inside and perfect crisp skin from the books, it involved like 4 steps of how to cook, like bathing them in a specific mixture of salt water, baking for 45 minutes, then running olive oil on the skins, then baking for another 15 minutes.

If they didn’t explain the why in the book, which I guess is the copyrighted part, and what the results are, I never would have tried that recipe.

Interesting fact - recipies cannot be copyrighted. Pictures can, but the recipe itself cannot.

The list of ingredients can't. But the instructions/explanation and description might be (in addition to the pictures/illustrations, as you mentioned.)

https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

There is a fine line you have to thread while copying instructions, usually you can't copy them verbatim. It is a rather strange quirk, if you rewrite a literary works you get slammed by the copyright hammer but not with recipes.

So a selection of tropes can be copyrightable.

A recipe can't (in USA and UK, AFAIK) but the specific presentation of the recipe can. It's an extension of facts not falling within copyright.

Food labs actually levelled up my cooking to the next level. So many great recipes and ideas. It was a very readable book too, I pretty much read it cover to cover. The best thing was buying a meat thermometer. Why did I cook for so long without it?

I’ll have to try your other recommendations now. :)

I should try that just to see if it's better than my old standby: poke potato a few times, microwave for 10 minutes, brush with oil and bake at 400F for 10 minutes.

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