There are hundreds of thousands of French food recipes available to anyone interested in French cooking. Of course, they’re written in French, and that can pose a problem for cooks who don’t read French. But it is not an insurmountable problem. Translating recipes written in French into English is not as difficult as it may first appear to someone not conversant in French. At least that’s what I’ve found to be the case.

     With English-language sources of French recipes available, why would anyone want to expend the effort to learn how to read recipes in French? In my experience, English-language French recipes can be broken primarily into two groups: 1) recipes written originally in French and translated into English; and 2) recipes written originally in English, but with a claim of French provenance. Each group has its specific problems, but the biggest problem in general can be described with one word: adaptation.

     During the process of translating a recipe into English, the translator adapts the recipe to match his or her own opinion of the reader’s skill level, kitchen, and ingredient availability. Since the reader will also automatically adapt any recipe for his or her own skill level, kitchen, and ingredient availability, the extra level of adaptation added by the translator removes the recipe one step further from its source. Even when a French recipe is written initially in English, the author may well have made adaptations for the non-French cook that exceed the bounds of what is necessary to simply transmit the recipe’s information. (There is a third group of French recipes originally written in a third language and translated into English, but this group is small, usually of obviously poor quality, and will be ignored for most of this discussion.)