My recipe rant

Way back in the days that Google maps did not exist, (I am purposely discounting any other technology that ‘promises’ to help you get where you want to go) there was the TomTom. Maybe you heard of it, maybe you haven’t – in short, it was a device that you would stick to the front window of your car and it would guide you where you want to go.
Eventually the TomTom got pretty good at guiding you to your destination but in the beginning it suffered from bugs.

I remember one time when I was finding my way in Belgium and instead of telling me to turn right at the next exit, the device told me that I had missed the exit after I had passed it. That was unpleasant. I had to drive for aeons to get back on track. Another time in Spain the TomTom guided us through rice fields (I kid you not) only to find ourselves stuck in a dead-end web of sandy roads. That too was an unpleasant experience.

The same thing often occurs when I follow a cooking recipe which in my mind works like this:

I have been cooking every day for the last couple of months now and what I find with most recipes is that the amount of time that is needed to prepare the meal is mostly wrong (or at least not right for my kitchen appliances) or that the ingredients are only available in mainland China and that you should have ordered them far in advance. What I do in those cases is find an alternative recipe. Hands-down the most dreadful thing that i get when I follow a cookbook recipe for the first time is that sentence at the end of the recipe saying: “Now put in the fridge for 24 hours and cook the next day”. What?! I have guests tonight!

When I see a recipe I like, I begin making the meal in the order in which it is written down (doesn’t everybody?). So at the start of the recipe it would say first make this, then prepare that, put that to a boil until you place all the ingredients on a plate.

I still love his cooking, but are there no UX people around when he writes his books? people who can observe people while they cook and tell him all the different kinds of manners there are that people approach cooking a recipe for the first time