08/14/2023
Comprehensive and inviting, this guide to conceiving, testing, writing, and publishing recipes more than measures up to its title, offering a wealth of practical advice tailored for creating a host of recipe types (including specialized plant-based, gluten-free, and health and allergy conscious options) for any of today’s methods of sharing recipes with the world. That means that Sarazen—a dietician, chef, and food writer possessed of extraordinary communicative precision and power—lays out how to take an idea for a new recipe or an adaptation for an old one from soup to nuts, in a way that ensures a recipe is accurate, readable, and reproducible—a set of instructions that translates the act of cooking into words.” The Complete Recipe Writing Guide also demonstrates the process of testing a recipe, modifying its ingredients to meet a host of health and dietary specifications, and even—in thorough, illuminating chapters—how to present the finished product in photographs and video.
Like any good recipe writer, Sarazen understands her audience might not have access to top-of-the-line equipment, so she includes advice for how to showcase food on a smartphone. That spirit of approachability powers the book, which in many ways offers a recipe for the creation of recipes. To achieve this, Sarazen throughout explicates the practicalities of this highly technical form of writing, with style guides and guidance about organization, crafting ingredient lists, and anticipating readers’ understanding, expectations, and points of possible confusion.
But the writing’s only part of it. Setting this guide apart is Sarazen’s ambitious efforts to introduce, in its information-packed first six chapters, a baseline knowledge of the techniques, ingredients, equipment, and possibilities of recipes. From mastering yield conversions to knowing the difference between cornmeal, corn flour, polenta, and grits, the book abounds in practical tips, charts, lists, sidebars, worksheets, and above all else inspirational knowledge about the science and art of crafting and writing recipes for all audiences.
Takeaway: Thorough, marvelous guide to crafting and writing recipes for all diets.
Comparable Titles: Dianne Jacob’s Will Write for Food, Beata Lubas’s How to Photograph Food.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
2023-08-07
Sarazen teaches readers to craft perfect recipes in this debut food guide.
There’s a lot more to creating a recipe than jotting a list of ingredients onto a notecard—even if that’s the form in which many of us encountered recipes for the first time. The author’s curiosity about recipes began in the kitchen of her grandmother, Sonia: “I believe that recipes (like my grandmother’s) are meant to be shared,” she writes in her introduction. “For recipes to live on, they must be accurately recorded.” With this book, Sarazen shepherds readers through the recipe-making process, from the earliest stages of development all the way to publishing them for others to use. She discusses how considerations like flavor combinations, aroma, and mouthfeel fit into a successful recipe, as well as issues of nutrition, allergens, and the requirements of various diets. She also shows the reader how to write and edit their recipes, both for ease of use and for descriptive precision (including the types of recipe titles that should be avoided). Sarazen even offers tips on how to style and photograph food, and guidance on making videos to help illustrate the cooking process. The book is, essentially, a recipe for recipes, and as such it embodies all the tenets that Sarazen preaches: It’s intuitively (and tastefully) organized, with crystal-clear prose and easy-to-follow how-tos for every possible situation. Here the author walks readers through the process of having their recipes sent to a lab for nutritional analysis: “Each laboratory has its own packing and shipping requirements, but in general, plan to ship the samples overnight or next day in the condition in which they must be to remain edible.” This book will be most helpful for bloggers or food influencers looking to professionalize their recipe game, but anyone interested in setting their recipes down on paper will learn plenty.
A polished, insightful how-to book for cooks at all levels.
