A while back I was discussing recipes with Julia Hastings-Black.1 We were not talking about any recipe in particular, but about the structure of recipes. Most modern recipes are typically divided into a number of sections such as title, ingredients, instructions, yield, notes, and introduction. Both of us mentioned our special frustration with recipes that bury mise en place information in the body of the recipe. You’ve seen examples: recipes that start with “heat some oil in a saucepan over high heat,” and then casually state, “peel and dice the onions and add to the saucepan.” By the time the onions are ready to add to the pan, the oil is overheated and filling the kitchen with smoke. If the instruction to prep the onions is placed in the ingredients list, then the cook knows to have the onions ready when the oil is starting to heat. Even though we are always advised to read all recipes through to the end before starting to cook, life is simpler when recipe instructions are presented completely and in a chronological order. This discussion led me to take a closer look at the structure of French recipes that I’ve seen in the past.

If we look back at old French recipes, we quickly find that recipes haven’t always been presented as they commonly are today. But let’s start at the beginning… One of the earliest French cookbooks is known simply by the name Viandier.2 It is believed to have been dictated by Guillaume Tirel (1315-1395),3 known as Taillevent, to a scribe near the end of the fourteenth century. Today, there are four existing versions of the original manuscript, all with slight variations. The original no longer exists.4 The following recipe for boiled meat is from the “Vatican” manuscript, which is believed to have been copied from an earlier version in the first half of the fifteenth century.5 The adjoining English translation is from Scully’s combined translations of all four versions of the original recipe.

The reader will quickly note that this ancient recipe lacks all of the detail that would exist in a modern recipe, and that there is essentially no pronounced structure to it. The recipe contains no quantities. There are no descriptions of the cuts of meat being prepared, only that they are large. There’s no instruction as to how to judge when the meat is cooked. There are recipes for the two sauces elsewhere in some of the Viandier manuscripts, but these recipes are equally vague.8 Even after the printing press came to France in the late fifteenth century, printed versions of Viandier provided no further clarity in the recipes.9

A century and a half passed before the next significant cookbook written in French appeared.10 In 1651, François Pierre, Sieur de La Verenne, (1615-1678) published the first of his three books, Le cuisinier françois. La Verenne’s boiled beef recipe, the now traditional bœuf à la mode, contains very little more structure and information than Taillevent’s recipe.

La Verenne occasionally slips and provides a little more information to help someone cooking from one of his recipes: “Cook it…for three hours”;13 “…after five or six turns”;14 or “…a dash of vinegar”.15 But these little cues are few. In his later books, La Verenne is slightly more generous with measurements, but still nothing like we expect in modern recipes.

Like Taillevent, La Verenne uses an abbreviated narrative structure to quickly describe the preparation of a dish. I have heard many times that these early chefs were writing for other professionals and thus didn’t need to include much detail. This may be true, but when these works were written, most chefs were illiterate and learned their trade with their eyes and hands.16 I suspect that most chefs were paid too little to own a personal copy of one of these early books although their employers may have purchased a copy for them to use.

Another earlier work contemporaneous with Viandier, Ménagier de Paris (1392 or 1393), was not necessarily written for the exclusive use of a professional chef. It was written by “a prosperous member of the Parisian legal world, associated either with the court of Parliament or with its members. … The cookbook is part of a larger, though unfinished, treatise on the duties of the housewife and is addressed to the author’s young bride. In his introduction, the author says that he is writing for her because she has begged him for instruction [that she will need to run the house], which she would rather receive in private. He is elderly; she is but fifteen.”17 Although Ménagier was written for a different audience, the recipes are no less terse or abbreviated than Taillevent’s or La Verenne’s.

Cookbook authors writing after La Verenne, up into the twentieth century continued to write in a narrative style with a structure of one, or maybe two, paragraphs. And like La Verenne, they occasionally toss in a few measurements. Pierre de Lune, in his recipe for bœuf à la mode, adds a demi-douzaine de champignons (half a dozen mushrooms),18 and François Massialot, in his recipe autre entrée de pièce de bœuf, calls for deux livres de sain-doux (two pounds of rendered pork fat) and specifies that the meat is braised for douze heures (twelve hours).19 In La cuisinière bourgeoise, the anonymous recipe author braises the meat for cinq ou six heures (five or six hours) and adds une cuillerée à bouche d’eau-de-vie (one tablespoon brandy) when the meat is half-cooked.20

At first glance, Audot’s recipe structure looks similar to his predecessors until you look closely at the recipes. Although the structure is still a narrative consisting of a single paragraph, the ingredients and methods are specified in more detail. Was Audot writing for a less informed audience or was he just presenting more detail for the benefit of whoever his readers may be?

Fifty years after Audot published La Cuisinière, Jules Gouffé wrote his equally massive Le Livre de cuisine. Gouffé takes the narrative structure one step further by breaking the single paragraph-long recipe found elsewhere into many paragraphs. Quantities are listed for all ingredients, although they are still mostly embedded in the text rather than listed separately at the beginning of the recipe as we expect today. The instructions are provided in much detail.

Gouffé’s somewhat verbose recipe structure does not appear to have been emulated by many other authors of the period, or indeed by most authors since. But the concept of embedding a precise list of ingredients within the body of the recipe became the norm throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Authors like Escoffier,23 Montagné,24 and Pellaprat25 combine detailed descriptions of ingredient quantities with somewhat terse instructions of preparation, often combined in a single paragraph, for most recipes.

It may be argued that with Gouffé, the audience begins to have an effect on the author’s style of writing and thus the structure of the recipe. Gouffé divides his book into two sections: one for the housewife and one for the professional. The recipes in the non-professional section seem to contain more description than those in the professional section. But this trend doesn’t seem to hold with the three authors mentioned above. Escoffier may have been writing for a professional audience, Pellaprat for a non-professional audience, and Montagné for both, but the structure of their recipes are all very similar. And lesser authors of the same period seem to have been influenced by these masters. Classic books such as La Véritable cuisine de famille26 and Le Nouveau livre de cuisine27 are written with the housewife firmly in mind, but follow the somewhat terse structure of Escoffier and his cohorts.

But there were exceptions among the major recipe authors of the time. Marie Ebrard, writing under the pseudonym La Vieille Catherine, uses a recipe structure that may be seen as an extreme opposite of her less windy compatriots. Her recipe for bœuf à la mode, published in an early issue of the magazine Le Pot-au-Feu, covers nearly six pages of the issue, and is too long to reproduce in this article.28 There’s a ten-paragraph-long introduction divided into two sections. This is followed by a list of the ingredients and their quantities for the meat portion of the dish. The ingredient list for the garniture is separate from the main ingredient list and the ingredient list for the sauce is embedded in the text. The preparation of the dish is described in excruciating detail, but the number of persons that the five-pound portion of meat will serve is not listed anywhere. In a majority of the other recipes she published in the magazine, she also included a résumé between the ingredient list and the instructions. The résumé was a concise, one-paragraph version of the recipe. (My experience with her recipes leads me to think that by reading only the résumé, I have at least ninety percent of the information I need to prepare her recipes.)

Ebrard writes with a similar structure in her massive cookbook published 32 years later, Le Livre de cuisine de Mme E. Saint-Ange. Here the recipe covers almost six pages and includes a long introduction.29 In the book there are three variations of the traditional bœuf à la mode recipe: bœuf à la mode à la ménagère, bœuf à la mode à la bourgeoise, and bœuf à la mode froid. The first two variations have detailed ingredient/quantity lists along with an estimate of the time required for the preparation. The third variation is more of a one-paragraph “word of advice” for serving either of the two previous versions cold.

Two years after it was initially published a laconic version was published under the title of La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange.30 This new version has only a single recipe for bœuf à la mode that fills only a line or two more than a single small page. After the ingredients/quantities list is shown as a very long run-on sentence, there is an estimate of the cooking time followed by the entire recipe presented in three succinct paragraphs.

At about the same time that Le Pot-au-Feu was coming to the end of its first of its three lives,31 another culinary magazine came into existence. The first issue of Culina: Publication Idéale de la Maîtresse de maison was published in 1908 and lasted at least until 1912, the date of my most recent issue. Recipes in Culina—I unfortunately don’t have an example of bœuf à la mode—typically start with a statement of the number of people that the recipe will serve. This is followed by a detailed list of ingredients, sometimes augmented with mise en place instructions. Recipes continue with a section labeled méthode, which are the instructions. Occasionally the instructions are numbered, but mostly not. Sometimes the recipe ends with a paragraph of remarques, or notes. Many of the recipes are illustrated with pen and ink drawings, and sometimes even with detailed photographs. In many ways, the structure of the recipes found in Culina is the first example of those to be found in current cooking publications.

At about this same time, the early editions of Ali-Bab’s Gastronomie pratique were being published. I don’t know what structure the recipes took in the earliest editions, the first being published in 1909, but the fourth edition, published in 1928 and considered by the publisher and others to be the definitive version of the book, contains recipes with the detail that one would expect from someone trained as an engineer32 rather than a cook. Ali-Bab only presents a cold version of bœuf à la mode in detail.

Gastronomie pratique also contains many recipes in a simple narrative structure that is reminiscent of early recipes that lacked quantities, except that Ali-Bab’s are still very detailed in their instructions.

After the conclusion of the Second World War, cookbooks started to look more and more like those we commonly see today. For example, Curnonsky’s bœuf à la mode recipe lacks the individual recipe notes of Gastronomie pratique but is in other ways quite complete.35 General introductory material introduces each section rather than each recipe. Preparation and cooking times are listed separately. Ingredients are listed in-line with quantities and preparation instructions. Instructions are detailed, but not verbose. And there’s even a color picture of a cold variation of the finished dish.

Over the last fifty years, the separate list of ingredients and quantities, sometimes with preparation instructions, has become the standard in recipe writing. Some recipes provide an estimate of total preparation and cooking time, but many don’t. Almost all list the number of people that the completed recipe will serve. Sometimes instructions are terse and other times wordy. Sometimes the instructions are numbered, but because the instructions are presented in order, the numbering is a bit superfluous. Sometimes the completed recipes are illustrated, and sometimes even the instructions are augmented with illustrations. Often the layout of a book or a magazine seems to dictate the structure of the recipe, causing some recipes to be easier to follow than others.

Although still occasionally found, the purely narrative structure of La Verenne or the quantitative/narrative structure of Audot are rare in modern recipe writing. Today’s recipes tend to be complete without being wordy, and of a completely different structure.