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Cooking Method - Do you preheat
oven, start grill, season pizza stone? Not everyone reads through a recipe before embarking on culinary adventure of making dish. Give your readers a bread - tell them up front what pans they need and what they need to do to them before they are ready to pour batter, or grill steaks.
The Process - My favorite cookbooks are ones that tell a story, either as an introduction to recipe, or during paragraphs explaining steps. You can number steps, or write it as an explanation. In your pizza recipe, include history of pizza, your history with pizza, how to make thin, crisp crusts or simple ways to make cheese-stuffed crust if you want something new to feed your teens. You can weave your tidbits into recipe - one cookbook on breads gave a recipe for making French baguettes with hard crusts. The key was to spray bread with water during baking. The author shared that she had, unintentionally, spritzed water on oven's light bulb causing hot bulb to shatter all over baking bread.
So how does cook know when it's finished? Don't just give time parameters. Cake recipes talk about toothpick test. Flans, I learned, are done when they are in firm yet wobbly stage. When making candy, be kind to cooks without candy thermometers and define what hardball and softball stages look like when staring into pot at a spoon covered in goo.
Extra Information - List substitutions. If your recipe for sorrel soup can be made with spinach as a substitute, share that. Tell about garnishes. Will your whipped cream and orange mousse look stunning with a mint leaf or thin chocolate medallion perched on top? Serving suggestions are another way to give your readers more than they expect. My chile relleno casserole benefits from cool side dishes like a spinach salad or mildness of homemade flour tortillas. Nutritional information is always a bonus, and sometimes a requirement. Don't forget information on how to store it, or if it tastes better second day.
Ready to submit? First, walk through recipe as you've written in. Did you list two tablespoons butter but forget to tell your readers to melt it? Did you have baking soda on list of ingredients but you never use it? Regroup, revamp, rewrite until it's perfect.
Copyright Stuff - Did you know that ingredients of a dish cannot be copyrighted but preparation can? You can take a traditional recipe, chicken Cordon Bleu - and use exact ingredients found in countless other cookbooks, but write your preparation in your own words (or even with a new approach.) I met a food writer once who said that her recipes were taken from popular cookbooks – she just changed three ingredients, adding parsley, using white pepper instead of black, and reducing amount of salt by half. Ta da - she felt she had an original recipe to sell. Not cool. (Did I just say that?) If you are so in love with one of Maida Heatter's lemon cakes that you added something special to it for your own signature touch, give credit to her for originating cake. If you want to publish someone else's recipe on a website or in a magazine, newsletter or book, write to publisher, addressing it to permissions department, and state where, why and how you would like to use it. Permission may be given with a fee attached or for free.
Don't steal recipes. Do acknowledge your influences, read cookbooks published throughout last two hundred years, and recognize that today's cookbook and magazine buyers may enjoy reading more than cooking. Write to that market, and you'll enjoy success.
Pamela White has written an e-book on becoming a food writer, teaches food writing classes and publishes on online newsletter on food writing. Information on all three is at http://www.food-writing.com
