Taillevent didn’t write recipes for you or me. Irrespective of the fact that he was writing his recipes in the first half of the prior millennium, or as has been suggested, that he was dictating the recipes since he probably was illiterate, his intended audience was most likely his employer. His purpose was to provide a record of his cooking.

Recipes have taken many forms since Taillevent’s example. His almost shorthand descriptions, over time, gave way to more prescriptive explanations. Modern recipes range from meager to verbose. Some include extensive headnotes that have little if anything to do with the actual recipe. This blog is a prime example of the last type.

In most cases, recipes fail to communicate with a large portion of the population. We are left with the paradox that recipes with limited instructions may not provide sufficient information for a novice cook but be easy for an experienced cook while recipes with detailed instructions may be appropriate for the novice cook but frustrating for the experienced cook.

Do you need an example of a recipe with limited instructions? Here’s a teaser that Hiroo Nagahara provided me a couple of months ago:

After preparing the recipe, I scratched out a more loquacious note in pencil on a piece of scrap paper:

The above is sufficient information for me to repeat the preparation, but you may require more if for no other reason than the fact you haven’t seen and tasted the final product.