The challenge of writing recipes

 An article in the Washington Post food section this week about recipe testing took me back to the 70s when I was food editor at the Detroit Free Press.

Very few newspapers then had test kitchens. (Not many have them today either.) I don't know how many food editors actually cooked but I was committed to trying every recipe before printing it. 

I inherited the Free Press test kitchen, an old, institutional-green painted room with an odd collection of antiquated utensils and a few beat-up pans. It was nothing like the photo of the Saveur magazine test kitchen above. 

I remember the first time I actually cooked something. People came from all over. Most reporters didn't even know the Freep had a test kitchen. That's how often it had been used.  

The Post article says that a story out of Chile this past December "was enough to make a publisher’s blood turn colder than a liquid nitrogen milkshake." A newspaper there, La Tercera, was convicted of printing a recipe that caused 13 people to get burned when frying churros in hot oil. They had to pay the victims  more than $160,000 in damages. When handing down its decision, the Chilean Supreme Court said, according to published accounts, that La Tercera had failed to fully test the recipe, causing the rolls of dough to become, essentially, projectile objects.

I agree that it's important for reporters to check all facts and that includes recipes.But even well-tested recipes don't necessarily guarantee success. I remember one cookie recipe that generated a lot of complaints. Surprisingly, the recipe with only three ingredients -- butter, sugar and flour -- had been tested several times and always turned out perfectly. For me, that is.

What could be the problem? A cube of butter is a cube of butter after all. It had to be the way people measured the flour and sugar. To investigate the problem, I collected measuring cups from several dozen neighbors and weighed one cup of sugar to see if all of the measuring devices held the same amount. What an unpleasant surprise! Only a few of the 1-cup measuring cups actually held that amount. 

But even if people weighed out their ingredients instead of using cups, there will still be problems. When I was on tour promoting my first cookbook, Five in Ten: Five Ingredients in 10 Minutes or Less, I prepared a lot of recipes with ingredients that had been assembled for me and found out that what is "finely chopped" to one person is "pulverized" to another. Recently I went to coffee at a friend's house. She served chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. When I asked for the recipe, she said it was mine. Funny thing is her cookies didn't look like any that I've ever seen.

Developing recipes is not an easy job. 

~ Paula