Origins
It strikes me as odd that to date no one has improved on the standard method of organizing and displaying the notation for recipes. What first came to mind was something very similar to music notation – the standard visual representation of events occurring over time capable of indicating a wide range actions. In fact, the design that appeared in my mind as I was falling asleep looked like this:
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Next step was really to define the total number of possible actions that occur in cooking. Wash, stir, heat, cut, it seemed like quite a few, but then you must imagine 1) that it is finite and 2) that even if it were more complex than music (and it probably wasn’t) most recipes could still be handled with a basic set and then footnotes could be added for the outside cases.
So what are the benefits? Well, first, music is not as restricted by language. Like mathematics, it travels well because most of the ‘terms’ are visual and exempt from words, local syntax et al. Words that are in musical notation are very limited and can learned quickly. It is certainly less terminology than what is in any complex cookbook – think braise, flambé, sauté, et al.
Second, usability (really this should be first). Recipes are horrible at conveying information. If that great example of Napoleon’s march is a how to display data well (it is able to express time, distance, # of troops dead, outside temperature and some correlation of these things), cooking recipes are presented in a format which actually creates problems for itself.
(click to enlarge)
Why, for example, is there no visual representation of time? You should be able to look at a recipe and see the events over a period – e.g., about when in this two process am I going to be doing the bulk of the cooking. Why is there no obvious visually distinction between types of events, say baking versus marinating. That with the exception of the ingredients list there is nothing other than innumerated narrative text is pretty much absurd. If music was at this stage of notation…well, there would be a whole lot less music.
The third benefit is that we might see things differently and better. At a glance, we might be able to judge a recipe and its complexity. We will probably have a better understanding how we will have to coordinate events over time – “wow, there are a lot of things that are going to be going on in sequence in measures three and four; there’s no way I can be deep frying donuts while that’s going on.” Especially when trying to pull together multiple dishes for a meal, having a visual display of the process change everything.
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