Lately Maya and I have been preparing dinner from recipes 3-5 times a week, mostly recipes we have never used before. As a result, I've come to the conclusion that there might be some room for improvement in the presentation of recipes. The typical presentation, with the list of ingredients (sometimes indicating the initial processing, like chopping, necessary for each one) followed by the steps of preparation, is certainly functional and natural. But when I'm in the thick of cooking, I often find myself searching desperately through the recipe's prose for a piece of information that I've already read at least 5 times, and taking too long to find it. I also tend to get slowed down when assembling several ingredients to be mixed together. I read one off the list, fetch it, measure it out, find the next one, repeat, with each 'read' taking, in my opinion, a lot longer than it should. So I've been thinking about other ways of presenting the information that might either replace or augment the standard one.

The most radical innovation I've seen (my experience is still quite limited, and I'd be glad to hear about others) is by Michael Chu over at Cooking for Engineers. In addition to prose, he presents at the end of his recipes a table (patent pending, he claims at the bottom of every page on the site) with a row for each ingredient, and a column for each processing step, with the rows merging every time ingredients are combined. They come out very nicely in HTML. A simple example can be seen by scrolling down in his recipe for Asparagus with Almonds. I haven't actually cooked from any of his recipes yet, but it seems like the table would be a much easier way to get a glance at the ingredients I need to combine in a given step. I might still need to refer back to the prose for details about a step, such as that "[when done] the asparagus should be crisp but without a raw taste," but some of those could always be added to the table if one were willing to sacrifice neatness and compactness. I also want to mention how great it is that Chu provides copious pictures of how the food ought to look at each step, something sorely lacking in cookbooks and on mainstream recipe sites.

Another idea I've had is to provide some visual sense of how long each step in the recipe takes, so that you can have an accurate idea of how far along you are. Many times, despite trying to read the recipe thoroughly before starting, I have looked down to see what to do next with my nice mixture, and found "chill for one hour", or four hours, or overnight. Argh! A chart showing the steps in rows, with the height of the row being proportional to the time consumed by the step, would clear this up instantly. This could even be combined with Michael Chu's tables. Or it could be expanded upon with multiple tracks for steps that can be done simultaneously, such as chilling one item while cooking another. An example, taken from Cooking For Engineers' Cheesecake Recipe:

The basic idea in this recipe is that you make the crust, pre-bake it, and let it cool, and while you're doing that you make the filling, then bake both, then let the final product cool and refrigerate before serving it. In the table above the word "Bake" in the Crust row has been reduced to a single pixel to make everything the right size. But I think this is a pretty fast and effective way of letting you know that you should not be putting your cake in the oven a half hour before the company is to arrive.