October 08, 2004
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Recipe diagrams
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435 hit(s)
One more today on tech writing and such. Raymond Chen recommends the site Cooking for Engineers, a blog that advertises itself with "Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!"
A couple of comments up front. First, people who like methodology and cooking should read Cook's Illustrated, in which testers attempt to create "perfect" versions of different dishes and then exhaustively try many variations (all documented) until they're satisfied. There's much to learn from the techniques and the variations in ingredients. Or you can just cut to the chase and cook the recipes. Second, anyone with the self-described analytical mind interested in food should have the aforementioned Harold McGee book On Food And Cooking.
Ok. Raymond comments "Marvel at the elegance and beauty of the recipe diagrams. I have no idea whether the dishes are any good, but the recipes themselves are works of art." Let's have a look. I trust Michael Chu will not object to us borrowing just one exemplar of his recipe diagrams:
I will agree with Raymond that the diagrams are elegant. An analog for this diagram is something like a syntax diagram for an SQL statement. Here's an example from the T-SQL reference in MSDN:CREATE TABLE
[ database_name.[ owner ] . | owner. ] table_name
( { < column_definition >
| column_name AS computed_column_expression
| < table_constraint > } [ ,...n ]
)
[ ON { filegroup | DEFAULT } ]
[ TEXTIMAGE_ON { filegroup | DEFAULT } ]
< column_definition > ::= column_name data_type
[ COLLATE < collation_name > ]
[ [ DEFAULT constant_expression ]
| [ IDENTITY [ ( seed , increment ) [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] ] ]
]
[ ROWGUIDCOL]
[ < column_constraint > ] [ ...n ]
etc. for another half page or so.
What are the advantages of a diagram format like this? A couple. They are compact; there is no extraneous text. They are precise; properly created, they are unambiguous. They are, as per the blog's intent, analytical. In the case of the SQL diagram, and more generally with logical diagramming, they abstract elements into components, which can make it easier to manipulate them symbolically.
Disadvantages? Yeah, they're hard to parse. Michael Chu's diagrams are not that hard, of course, since the syntax of cookery is substantially simpler than the convolutions of SQL, thank goodness. But you still have to be able to read "through" the formatting and effectively fill in the pieces that were squeezed out by the formatting in first place. In Michael Chu's diagrams, for example, the reader has a comparatively high cognitive load in reconstructing the sequence of steps required to create the recipe, at least, compared with the traditional step-by-step list.
But actually I am protesting a little too much. In fact, Michael does present full step-by-step instructions in his articles, as he calls them, complete with photographs. So really the diagrams are summaries. Any intricacies in the recipes -- specific textures to achieve, specific ways to stir or whisk or what-have-you -- are covered in the longer, more traditional step-by-step procedures that Michael also provides.
I did think this comment was as good an illustration of the analytical mind as any:Traditionally served over linguine, shrimp scampi makes a quick and easy dinner that works equally well eaten in front of the computer or as the main dish of a romantic candlelight dinner.
:-)
Update One thing I'm not crediting Michael Chu with is that he's invented a diagramming technique that's multi-dimensional, in that it captures instructions and ingredients (verb + object) as well as sequence (first this, then that) in the left-to-right nature of the boxes. In theory, he could even indicate the overall time requirement for each step via the width of each verbal box. This is unlike the SQL diagram, which has a componentized/reentrant flavor (e.g., column_definition can be repeated essentially indefinitely, at least, according to the diagram). So the analogy between the recipe diagram and an SQL diagram is perhaps not that close except in the more general sense of diagramming generally. The general point still holds; the diagram is an abstraction of a grammar, but the analogy, she ain't so great.
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