I’m sick of having to look up what country an author is from to know which variant of teaspoon they’re using or how big their lemons are compared to mine. It’s amateur hour out there, I want those homely family recipes up to standard!
What are some good lessons from scientific documentation which should be encouraged in cooking recipes? What are some issues with recipes you’ve seen which have tripped you up?
If you’re asking scientists about writing protocols, you clearly don’t know how scientific protocols work. If anything, scientists need to take lessons from recipe writers on how to write protocols. Scientific protocols are notoriously difficult to replicate.
Here’s a burger recipe written like a scientific methodology:
Methods sections are limited in word count, and if a lab is hoping to get a few more papers out of a paradigm, they may be intentionally terse. There’s a big difference between how we write protocols in-house and how we write limited-length methods sections.
I don’t share this notion, as a scientist. Especially not in industry. SOPs are extremely detailed to the point of including lot numbers, etc. If done right it leaves no room for interpretation.
Fair call, many fields tend to write just like you described haha.
Maybe chemistry scientists could be a better reference.
Chemistry might not be much better. It’s because scientists generally assume that readers already know how to do the techniques, and so the only information they would care to provide are the ones that wouldn’t be considered obvious. Such as equipment brand, the name of the technique if there’s multiple techniques that do the same thing, or experiment-specific modifications to the technique.
My understanding is that it’s a holdover from older times, when scientists were charged per word, and so methodology would be cut down to remove anything considered “general enough” knowledge