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Comment by samizdis | Hacker News Reader

I remember this from many years ago. Much as I appreciated the step-by-step instructions and their accompanying pictures, I always thought that the genius element - and perhaps one that might have real IP value - was the schematic representation combining recipes and the cooking process.

My favourite example of this is the schematic for the "meat lasagne" recipe, which is at the end of the instructions and before the comments:

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/36/Meat-Lasagna

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As an Italian I am contractually bound to replying that there is no mozzarella nor ricotta nor cream in traditional meat lasagne. It's a bechamel sauce, made of milk. Booo!

Can you recommend a cooking book with 100% authentic Italian dishes? All the recipes I find online (especially from US sources) always like to add their own spin on a recipe.

I make lasagna using bechamel sauce as well, but you'll also find videos with chefs that add mozarella (or other cheeses) to their bechamel sauce. So a traditional recipe can be sabotaged at every stage of the process!

can't say for a cookbook, but try https://www.giallozafferano.com/. Giallozafferano has essentially taken over all other italian websites for recipes, because it's clear, with pictures, and has EVERY recipe you can dream of. It also has an English language version as you can see. This said, Italians sometimes criticize it anyway, because it's not always perfectly proper, and because monopoly is never good. But Italians would criticize anything except their grandmothers when it comes to cooking, so I recommend you try it. It's generally a sufficiently good reference benchmark even for Italians and is complete.

Thank you so much! Finding good recipes online has become such a disaster because of all the blog recipe spam, especially when looking for international dishes in English where even the decent sites have very "americanized" versions of the dish.

I feel you, as a lover of Asian cuisine who certainly cannot google in Thai or Chinese.

Find dish on Wikipedia. It'll have the native name somewhere on the page, probably, or else you can switch to a version of the page in the correct language. Put dish name (and maybe the translated word for "recipe" or "food") in search engine. Find a page that looks like it has what you want. Hit it with Google Translate.

I’m not Italian but I have two favorite reference books: The Silver Spoon[0] and American Sfoglino[1]

0: https://www.phaidon.com/store/food-cook/the-silver-spoon-978... 1: https://evanfunke.com/orderamericansfoglino

I'd be willing to try a version with bechamel but the ricotta provides a signature distinctive taste. I suppose without it, it would taste pretty different. So, yeah, like the sibling comment says - this dish has evolved while retaining its old name. Much like some loanwords which take on new connotations.

I would not use the word "evolve", because in Italy it has not "evolved". There has been made an American version, which would have been best if it were called with a different name, but I guess I can't have everything...

Wikipedia disagrees with you that there is such a thing as the one true "Italian" version of this dish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasagne#Local_variations

I would rather replace "evolved" with "degraded", or better butchered or destroyed.

you can generally put all British, German or US cooking "evolvements" put into this category. thankfully the recent "fusion" cooking doesn't involve anything related to these evolvements, only the good asian and central american kitchens.

The authority in the English language is Marcella Hazan. Her "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" is probably the most comprehensive if you check out only one.

Just hit up the first amazon result to check out the book reviews, and seems like the recipes aren't traditional. Thanks for the suggestion however. Snippet of the review

> As an example, I made the carbonara in this book which calls for (among other ingredients) ... "4 cloves of garlic" & "1/4 cup dry white wine" & "2 Large Eggs".

> Upon further research, an authentic Italian carbonara has no garlic, no white wine and only the yolks of eggs.

> I have found several recipes in this book already which are not true to the original recipes. Granted, this may not worry some people, but please bare in mind that if you are looking for true authentic Italian recipes ... look elsewhere. This book will not give it to you.

Gosh, garlic and wine, what the hell... as for whole eggs, this is allowed, some people do that :)

You can't really go wrong with Marcella Hazan's books. She was an evangelist for traditional Italian recipes and methods in the US starting in the 1970s much the same way Julia Child was with French cuisine. Her marvelously simple tomato/onion/butter sauce is revelatory.

I highly recommend "Silver Spoon". Published in 1950s - about 2000 recipes - Indexed thoroughly - I use it both for its recipes and also for its heft as a doorstop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_cucchiaio_d%27argento

https://www.phaidon.com/store/food-cook/the-silver-spoon-978...

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/5006077 (The translation into English was a small miracle)

Oh, I got the German version from my sister for Christmas once. I should really try to make some recipes from it, but it’s so much more work to look them up offline ;)

Searching foreign recipes in their native language then using Google Translate on the recipe (assuming you don't speak the language) has served me well in the past. Some not-that-uncommon dishes are wildly different (and, sometimes, far better) from what you find searching in English. Often much fattier :-)

Wikipedia can be helpful for translating the dish name. They'll either list the name directly, or you can switch to the version of the article in the dish's home language.

Difficulty: this is less useful for Indian dishes because they'll almost always include ingredients an American won't have in even a stocked-for-Indian-dishes kitchen. Usually a great strategy for European dishes, at least, though.

I believe Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene ("The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well") is the classic reference and has been in print since the late 19th century. It is available in many translations.

It's an amusing read but it's hardly usable today unless you want to stuff a pheasant yourself.

The Italia Squisita YouTube channel has an excellent series of videos of Italian chefs preparing their signature dishes (lasagna: https://youtu.be/H-Ll19h9FFo).

They are 100% authentic Italian by definition, but if you are looking for THE singular authentic Lasagna recipe you aren’t going to find it. Even within Italy there are huge regional variations, and the practice is continually evolving to this day.

I really like this chef’s outro (another lasagna video: https://youtu.be/zXZq6crD6WI) Basically he says “This is how I make it and honour my region and my ancestors, but you should make it however you like, and experiment, because it means the food is alive”.

As a third-generation Italian migrant, I'd remind you that food evolves. The grandmas and aunts always made both bolognese and chicken lasagna, with a heavy tomato sauce and a lot of cheese, in a pretty similar way (never any cream though). I'd take that any day over a "proper" one with bechamel!

I smiled when I saw that your pasta dish included chicken, another example of how food evolves.

Nobody said it didn't evolve, and you're the first one to use the word "proper" which has a much different connotation than "traditional." Think of it as a snapshot in an event-sourced system. You can take a bunch of snapshots over time, but #53 is going to be the same every time. A "traditional" lasagna has a bechamel sauce. You can make it without, and it can be as good or better. It just won't be traditional, which is totally fine.

I'm not Italian, but my impression from traveling in Italy is that every town\village\grandma has their own version of nearly every Italian dish and they all consider theirs to be the traditional version. I think I got told three or four times that I was in the village where focaccia was invented - different villages, that is. And they were all quite different focaccias so I guess they were all right.

Side note: bechamel lasagne is usually called lasagne al forno and I think it comes from Bologna. In many other parts of Italy they don't use bechamel in their traditional lasagnes, and they often do use ricotta and mozzarella.

What’s a third generation Italian migrant? Your family has been migrating for three generations? Or you’re just an American with an Italian great-grandparent?

I'd assume it means their primary language is Italian, and they basically only interact with other Americans who's great grand parents were Italian and primarily speak Italian.

So like a snapshot of Italian culture as it was a few generations back like how Quebec is a snapshot of historic France and Newfoundland is a snapshot of england

My great-grandparents migrated from Italy to Brazil. Is there a better way to phrase that?

It's not a really strong identity, we don't cultivate the ancestry like Americans do, so unfortunately I don't speak the language, neither do most of the ~30M italian descendants in the south. The deeper into the countryside you go though, you start hearing old dialects of italian (and german).

This whole ricotta in lasagna thing is so strange… why on earth would you do that?

Because it tastes really good.

> and perhaps one that might have real IP value

At the very bottom of the page...

> Tabular Recipe Notation Patent Pending (Michael Chu)

There's a thread for it in the forums -

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24...

Apparently, he tried to patent it - but in various patent searches I haven't found anything.

The thread goes on until August 2021 with occasional activity - but no information on the patent.

And for what it's worth... the person who created it hasn't been active on the php forum for the site since 2017.

I do something similar with any recipe I get. I go through the list of ingredients and draw brackets around things that go together, then indicate which order the "buckets" join together.

That way, I can prepare things directly into bowls (or directly into pans) together.

I also call out which one needs to go first if there is one. For example, softening butter in the microwave needs to happen first, because it's a combi microwave and oven and I'll need it as an oven later.

that kind of schematic is exactly what i've wanted ever since I started trying to learn how to cook recipes (as opposed to just knowing some basic techniques and mixing things I like). I've always wondered why cooking, which is a very procedural and quantitative thing, doesn't have more standardization and conventions. If you're just trying to replicate an existing recipe to the T, it makes so much more sense to use numbers and diagrams than prose (let alone the irrelevant blogs that so many cooking websites attach to their recipe pages).

> let alone the irrelevant blogs that so many cooking websites attach to their recipe pages

I'm pretty sure this is just for SEO hacking

> let alone the irrelevant blogs that so many cooking websites attach to their recipe pages

Recipes themselves can't be copyrighted.

https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

> Recipes are usually not protected by copyright due to the idea-expression dichotomy. The idea-expression dichotomy creates a dividing line between ideas, which are not protected by copyright law, and the expression of those ideas, which can be protected by copyright law.

> ...

> Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients.

So basically you can copyright your blog which I skipped entirely, but not the actual materials and process, which is all the information of value anyway lol.

Yeah, it’s genius. I wish every recipe was written in this way.

Be interesting to see someone take cooklang recipes and convert them to the recipe "schematic" used by CFE.

Hmm... feeling an itch...

cooklang is awesome, would love to see something like that

i love that diagram! I enjoy cooking just enough to do it but not enough to want to do it. In the consulting world what we call "solution architects", i know it's very weird jargon, would make very good cooks IMO. It's all about scheduling, resource allocation, and following procedure.

Oh my god that is brilliant.

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