When I started writing a newspaper recipe column almost 3 years ago it was an education, a learning process of writing down recipes in a way that made them hopefully user friendly. By that I mean they should be easy to follow, not too complicated and strike a balance because the readers will be a mixture of novice’s and experienced cooks…after all being a good chef does not automatically make you a good recipe writer.
It seems simple enough to write the recipe once you have the quantities…right?
I re-read my recipes and spell check them to hopefully catch most mistakes, never the less being a real working chef sometimes between the cooking and the writing my day can become very long.
I some times ask others to read them prior to publishing if I am trying to explain certain techniques. I prefer non-chefs for this to gauge how well the recipe is understood.
I used to write my recipes in both metric and imperial but then about 18 months ago decided it was time to just use metric and see if I got any adverse feed back
(I did not).
I always write a preamble to entice the reader in, though sometimes in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury these are edited, or even cut out due to lack of space.
I try to write a mixture of recipes to cover all courses, cuisines and seasons of the year.
Though I don’t have an army of assistants like my more famous colleagues, I physically make each dish myself before publishing to ensure that it works.
Avoid using ingredients that are not generally available to the public, what’s the point of me writing a recipe with foie gras for instance if the vast majority of readers can not either source or afford it?
I also tone down the presentation of the finished dish to hopefully make the end result achievable.
Occasionally I get fed back from the readers of my column, which I enjoy very much,
I always make a point of writing a reply thanking them.
At the end of the day writing good easy to understand recipes is my goal. Striving to strike a balance between enough information so the reader understands the process and too much information which can give the impression that the recipe is too complex to attempt.
The Art of Recipe Writing © Kevin Ashton 2006
