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Comment by tgb | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why recipes have the ingredient list and quantity separate from the instructions. I often have to scroll up and down (even on a mostly-decent recipe site like all recipes.com) first to see what gets added next and then to see how much of it to add. Why not tell me it's one teaspoon of salt in the same place as you tell me to add the salt? Only advantage to separating them is to make the shopping list, but no reason one can't duplicate the quantities.

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It's a comparatively recent idea. It only appeared in the 19th century, with the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School cookbook. It introduced the whole idea of exact measures, rather than "a lump of butter the size of a walnut" and "enough to make a stiff dough". Before that, recipes were told like stories.

It was a scientific way of cooking: gather and measure all your ingredients before you start. In a commercial kitchen you still do that: you go to work hours before the doors open to put everything in place (mise en place). That's how you get reliable results.

Even if you don't gather stuff, a good home cook will still scan the list to ensure that they have what they need. Still, It wouldn't be a bad idea to also replicate the measurements in the recipe itself. Perhaps they have the coder's instinct to not duplicate information.

Great British Chefs [0] sort of does this - they have both a full list of ingredients with quantities and also at each recipe step they list off the ingredients with quantities used in that step.

[0]: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com

Same. As a result, I've been using this LaTeX package for my personal recipe collection (see example on page 5): http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/cuisine/cui... [PDF]

(I'm in the process of abandoning LaTeX in favor of a custom Markdown → Pandoc → HTML flow with basically the same layout, though.)

I save my recipes in plain old text files. For a long time now I've been meaning to write them up in LaTeX and print them on A6 cards with a nice font. Then construct a nice wooden box to put them in.

That sounds nice. Do you have a good way of organizing it?

We have our recipes in a Trello board for meal planning, grocery list making, etc. I wrote a Python script to extract the data and print out an oft-used subset of them in a nice readable format. I use a Jinja2 template to format the pages with HTML and CSS, then convert them to one PDF document for printing.

I use an 8.5x11 page with metadata on one side (name, description, time to make, tags, dates made, etc.) and the recipe on the other. On the recipe side I have ingredients at the top of the page in two columns, and then the directions at the bottom in two columns.

We put this page in a plastic sleeve and into a 3-ring binder. When we want to make the recipe, we take it out and tape it to the cupboard with masking tape. That way anyone in the kitchen can easily see it and prep their part.

Funny, after trying out all sorts of digital recipe organization methods, I've settled on plain old 4x6 index cards as the most useful.

I have all of my recipes plaintext in an org file with a very simple format...

  * Recipe title
  ** Ingredients
     - 1 tsp x
     - 2 tbsp y
  ** Directions
     1. Mix together x and y
     2. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes

I set up a simple python script using the same package as the OP's website for scraping recipe sites to org format, then I export subsections to latex with a custom class and print to index cards.

My site (the OP) uses a separate print-specific CSS to try and format recipes to a 4x6 index card. It doesn't work as well as I'd like, as in, it's hard to get what shows up on the screen to print on an odd-sized piece of paper, but if you, or someone you know, has CSS expertise then I'd love for someone to help make this work more reliably!

That might be coming from the tradition of mis-en-place - “everything is put in place”. The idea is that you prepare all the ingredients and have them in front of you before you start cooking. Oftentimes cooking process requires precise timing and parallel execution and you will not have a time to search for an ingredient, measure it, or prep (dice, wash etc).

unfortunately the recipes never include the steps required to prep the things. There's the ingredients, and then halfway through the recipe there's the "now add the chopped carrots" ..."WHAT?!?! you never told me to chop the carrots!"

drives me nuts. I have to rewrite any recipe i want to keep making to actually have all the required instructions.

Usually though, FYI, they specify 'chopped' in the ingredients list. But that leads to the equally-infuriating "Only takes 5 minutes of prep!" but the ingredient list hides the fact that you have to make a pie crust or chop two pounds of veggies not included in that estimate.

I'm usually pretty good at getting veggies and seasonings ready beforehand, but 'now add cooked chicken' gets me almost every time.

TBH I have never seen professionally prepared cookbook or popular recipe sites surprising me like that. Small recipe blogs - maybe.

I've found it useful for knowing if you have enough of each ingredient. If they weren't separate, one of the first things I would need to do would be to sit down and work out what ingredients I need to know if I need to buy more or not.

It annoys me greatly when the ingredients list is not organized logically.

When I write recipes I group the ingredients by step. So for example I might have a "Sauce Ingredients" block, and the instruction will be "add sauce ingredients to the pan". It makes mise less annoying, I don't have to keep scanning the instructions to figure out how to organize my ingredients.

The easiest way to cook is to have lots of small bowls for the ingredients. Each ingredient gets measured out into a bowl and put aside. Then when you need it, you dump the bowl into the dish being prepared.

This is assumed in all the time estimates, as well. Time spent getting the ingredients into the bowls isn't counted, so if something calls for 3 chopped onions you have to add the peeling & chopping time to get the real prep time.

Agreed! It’s a pet peeve of mine too. Here’s some history on why it’s that way and on a better UX:

https://www.makebetterfood.com/about/

I don't know, this is overkilling it. As a Mediterranean, of course you would prep every ingredient beforehand and then just follow the recipe. Mise-en-place or not.

Cooking for Engineers.com puts a compact table in the recipes, which shows the list of ingredients and the order of preparation and combination. I think he calls it "Tabular Recipe Notation" or something like that.

It took me a moment to grok the format, but once I did I found it to be really helpful.

https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/4/26/cooking-for-engi...

Generally when cooking you'll set your station (mise en place), placing all the ingredients in reach and preparing to cook.

Keeping ingredients listed separately from instructions dovetails into this practice.

And if it's on a computer instead of on paper, there's no reason you can't tag the ingredients inline, and automatically generate your shopping list from the tags.

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