Good morning and welcome to your first post-Thanksgiving Shelf Life. It’s all downhill from here till the end of the year. I know there are five weeks left of 2022 but legally nothing can happen during those weeks. The year is officially over. We’re all just going through the motions now. You can purchase holiday gifts and mull wine if you want but you can’t embark on any new projects or initiatives. This is the wrong time of year for that. It’s hibernation season.
While I was away for Thanksgiving—I’m going to make this short story extra short—my stepmother was using a recipe and it was improperly edited and that’s how we landed on the theme of today’s article.
For several years earlier in my career I did freelance editorial work for a client publisher who put out a lot of trade/commercial nonfiction. Lots of books you see cover-out or on a display table in the bookstore with eye-catching covers and mass audience appeal. I can’t sort most of the titles into broad categories because they were all over the place. Books by pop psychologists about finding romance. Books about getting your house ready to bring home your first baby. Stuff like that. Then the big broad category that contained about half the books they sent me for editing: Cookbooks.
I was in high demand as a cookbook copyeditor because I cannot cook. Like, at all. If this seems counterintuitive to you—shouldn’t you know something about cooking if you’re going to edit cookbooks?—consider that a person who does not know how to cook at all will become confused by any instructions that aren’t perfectly clear and will not be able to mentally substitute instructions that are missing. For instance a lot of cookbook authors skip over preparing potatoes for cooking and start by telling you to boil them. What, the whole thing? Do I need to remove the skin? Do I need to cut it into pieces? Do I need to rinse it off first, Kimberly?! Or are we just chucking a whole dirty potato into the pot?
Also I’m really good at memorizing a complex ruleset and applying it exactingly, but that’s all copyeditors. That’s not a special Catherine skill.
Cookbooks are a lucrative business. I can’t speak to the celebrity cookbook market because I only worked on cookbooks by regular people, but the company I worked for had them down to a science. The company actually owned all the recipes, which were created as works for hire on the company’s behalf. They would hire writers to, first, select a themed set of recipes from the publisher’s content management system. For instance, forty recipes that are all breakfast dishes, or all dishes made with potatoes, or all Irish dishes, or all recipes perfect for busy weeknight dinners. Then the hired writer would draft new flavor text for each recipe: For instance, “I love making this dish for my family on a cool autumn evening with the smell of snow on the air….” Whether any of the writers have ever cooked any of the recipes is dubious. Then they’d send the resulting manuscript to me for editing.
They also did licensing arrangements so they’d do cookbooks themed around popular media franchises, for instance. Anyway, very lucrative.
Recipes can’t actually be copyrighted. That is, the list of ingredients and the instructions, those cannot be copyrighted. All the surrounding flavor text is copyrighted, though. That’s where the value is in a cookbook. You can read a breakdown of why recipes cannot be copyrighted on the Copyright Alliance website.
What that means is, if you want to publish a cookbook and some of your recipes came off the back of the box of whatever ingredient or out of a magazine you read in the 1980s or were handed down from your Grandma, they’re all fair game as long as you’re only bringing over the list of ingredients and the instructions. Anything else you want to include in your cookbook—photos, flavor text, anecdotes, et cetera—have to come from you.
If you’re thinking about putting together and self-publishing a cookbook, I have some tips below on how to edit your text to get it ready for page composition (typesetting). Cookbooks are a product I really don’t recommend typesetting yourself or pushing out in black-and-white text-only to Kindle, since consumers often choose them based on how beautiful they are inside and out (or what celebrity chef authored them, but you’re probably not a celebrity chef if you’re reading this). I might do a follow-up article at some point on page design principles for cookbooks; it’s a lot.
Yields
Each recipe should include a yield that describes how much food the recipe makes. This does not have to be precise, as in “four and three-quarters cups” but can and should be written in normal-person language like “serves four” or “makes one sandwich” or “one dozen biscuits.” Something to note is that if a dish could be served as a main or as a side, you can distinguish the yields, as in “Serves four as the main course or eight as a side dish.”
Measurements
Measurements. Ought to be. Consistent. There are two ways that cookbook writers tend to be inconsistent with their measurements:
Mixing weight (mass) and volume.
Mixing metric and imperial.
You should not do either of these if you can help it, but definitely don’t mix metric (eg, grams) and imperial (eg, ounces). Pick one measurement system and use it. This goes not just for ingredient measurements but temperature measurements as well—don’t mix imperial units (ounces) with metric units (degrees Celsius). Celsius is to metric as Fahrenheit is to imperial.
Mixing weight (ounces or grams) and volume (teaspoons, cups) measurements is more common and less of a faux pas. Both British and American cooks use cups and spoons to measure volume but bear in mind that a US cup and a UK cup are not quite the same. Most cooks in the UK and other parts of the world use a kitchen scale to measure ingredients by weight instead of by volume or might use milliliters to measure volume.
Something to keep in mind is that a fluid ounce is a measurement of volume, not weight or mass, and is not equal to an ounce. If something is weighed in ounces do not describe it as a fluid ounce just because it is a liquid.
Abbreviations
There are different ways to abbreviate measurements in a cookbook and, again, the idea is to be consistent. Your options are, basically:
No abbreviations—spell out measurements like “grams,” “ounces,” “cups,” “tablespoons,” “teaspoons.”
All measurements abbreviated—abbreviate across the board, as “g,” “oz,” “c,” “tbsp,” “tsp.”
Some measurements abbreviated—usually this means “tbsp” and “tsp” are used but “cup” and “cups” are spelled out.
The abbreviations I specifically listed in the bullets above are commonly used and most users will recognize them without trouble. If you’re going to use other abbreviations, it would be wise to include a key in the front of the book somewhere so users know exactly what all your abbreviations mean.
Ingredient Lists
The first and most important thing is that ingredients should be listed in the same order as they are called for in the instructions. If your instructions call for you to dice an onion first and then put the onion into the pan later, after the olive oil but before the garlic, you put “1 onion” on the ingredient list first, before the olive oil and garlic. If you call for the onion to be diced already in your ingredient list, as in “1 onion, diced” then you do not need to include an instruction to dice the onion, and you list the onion after the olive oil but before the garlic, because that is the order in which they are used in the recipe.
If an ingredient is going to be split and used in two different steps, list that ingredient in the order it appears in the recipe the first time but indicate that it is “divided” or “divided use.” You may list one quantity and indicate the split in the instructions or, if the quantity is measured in a different way for different parts of the recipe, you can indicate the split in the ingredient list. For example:
A recipe that calls for half a cup of water in step 2 and a quarter cup of water in step 4: “3/4 cup of water, divided”—you can include the total quantity and describe the split in the instructions.
A recipe that calls for half a cup of butter in step 2 and 2 tablespoons of butter in step 4: “1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp butter, divided”—this makes more sense than trying to add the quantity together as “10 tbsp.”
If you’re using the same ingredient prepared more than one way, you can list it separately on the ingredient list with each preparation listed in the order it’s called for or you can list them together in the order the first preparation is called for and describe the separate preparation:
“2 small onions, 1 diced and 1 thinly sliced”
“1/2 cup butter, softened” and “1 tbsp butter, melted”
If you want to include ingredient substitutions, you can do that right in the ingredients list. If the amount is different for the substituted ingredient, make sure to include the correct amount.
“1/2 cup butter (margarine may be substituted for butter)
“1/2 cup butter (3/8 cup of pumpkin puree may be substituted for butter)
You do not need to list very common substitutions; for instance, most people know that margarine may be substituted 1:1 for butter or that 2 percent milk may be substituted for whole in most recipes. If you plan to include ingredient substitutions for most or all recipes (for instance, if you want to offer a vegan version of each recipe), then you may consider adding a “Substitutions” heading (since there will be many) instead of putting them all in the ingredients lists.
If you want to flag allergens, you can do so but the idea is to do this very prominently, perhaps on your table of contents or with an icon in the margin, so that readers can see at a glance that a recipe contains something they’re allergic to. The only point in doing this is to save them the effort of reading the ingredients, since they will see their allergen in there anyway.
Instructions
List the instructions in the order a person would do the steps, keeping in mind these three rules:
Preparing any equipment is first—like preheating your oven or greasing your baking pan.
Preparing any ingredients is second—like dicing, chopping, dissolving a bouillon cube, whatever.
Everything else comes after those.
For me, I don’t start preheating the oven immediately if I know a recipe will take me more than 10 minutes to prepare because that’s how long it takes my oven to heat up. This doesn’t matter. Preheating the oven should be the first instruction for any recipe that uses the oven.
When instructing the user to prepare their ingredients, you can either make this an instruction (“dice the onion”) or you can include the ingredient already prepared in the ingredient list (“1 small onion, diced”). However, if the preparation is more than cutting something up—if it involves cooking itself, like parboiling or making broth—that should be a separate instruction.
Your final instruction in each recipe should indicate how to serve the dish: Warm? Hot? Cold? You can also use this space to indicate your serving suggestions, for example, “top with sour cream” or “provide queso for dipping.” If you are giving optional serving suggestions, the ingredients called for in your suggestions should be included in the ingredients list as optional items:
“Optional: Sour cream, for topping”
Indexing
Most of the books we talk about in Shelf Life are not the kind of books that need an index. Cookbooks, however, really benefit from indexing. Indexing well is a skill that takes time to learn and indexers typically have sophisticated software that helps them with their work. That said, some word processors have an automatic indexing function. It’s not super smart; it will just compile instances of words you used (which is more of a concordance but we don’t need to get into that right now). It will not compile themes intelligently.
To illustrate, your word processor can probably pick out every instance of the word “chicken” and give you a list of the page numbers that word appears on. It probably can’t pick out every vegetarian recipe in the cookbook and give you all those page numbers. If you want your cookbook to have an index, your word processor’s auto indexing function can get you started, but probably can’t do the whole job for you (not if you want it to be a good job).
Someday I’ll do an article soon on semi-automatic indexing in Microsoft Word—but not this day.
Anyhow there you have it. Now all you need is some recipes and you’re ready to write a cookbook. This is just the time of year for it, too. Make a little cookbook of family recipes or something. Nothing else is going on for the next five weeks so you might as well.
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