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From: recipes@decwrl.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.recipes
Subject: Mod.recipes editorial policies (last updated 4 January 1987)
Message-ID: <7842@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Wed, 28-Jan-87 04:10:20 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.7842
Posted: Wed Jan 28 04:10:20 1987
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I edits each recipe for correctness and consistency. Besides the obvious
issues of spelling and grammar and style, there are some specific editorial
policies that recipes are rewritten to meet. In no particular order, those
policies are:

* No rambling. No long-winded explanations when short-winded explanations
will do. In particular, I will remove any description of a cooking technique
that is adequately described in ordinary cookbooks. Unless the recipe is
extremely short or the explanation extremely interesting, I also remove
essays about how you came to create the recipe.

* No preaching. Many people like to submit recipes that preach some kind of
dogmatic position with respect to cooking or eating. An essay about nutrition
or cholesterol, however relevant to life, does not belong in a recipe. You
can put short nutritional comments in the "Notes" section of the recipe, but
only to inform and not to preach.

* No fake ingredients. If you like to use bouillon cubes or garlic powder
instead of real broth and real garlic, that's your business, but the recipes
get sent out asking for real ingredients. A cook who will use garlic powder
instead of fresh garlic will likely do that no matter what the recipe calls
for. If you can convince me that the success of your recipe depends on using
margarine instead of butter or instant coffee instead of espresso, that's
fine, but in general I will challenge the use of convenience ingredients.

* No brand names or per-package measurements. Perhaps your grandmother's
recipe for chicken soup called for "1 box of Putzleheimer", but the average
reader in Japan or New Zealand isn't going to know what Putzleheimer is, let
alone how much of it is in one box. Just because canned soup always comes in
the same size cans in your supermarket doesn't mean that it comes in those
same-size tins in a market in Harrogate. If you genuinely don't know how big
"1 small can of Ortega chilies" is, I can usually find out for you, but I 
will send out the recipe saying "4 oz / 120 g" and not "1 can".

* No mystical quantities. In a recipe making 12 liters of soup, don't expect
me to believe that it needs to have exactly 6.375 tablespoons of flour.
No recipe needs a measurement accuracy better than 5%, and most recipes are
quite happy with measurement accuracies on the order of 20%.

* No mystical procedures. Perhaps you have found that you can get fluffier
pancakes by flashing each pancake with a camera's electronic flash just
before you turn it, but I'm quite confident that you would get the same
results if you waved an old shoe over it (provided the old shoe is clean).

* No jargon or dialect. I edit "fridge" into "refrigerator" and "put it in
the nuke" into "warm in the microwave oven". Similarly, I will change "Then
just go stir 'em right on in" into "add the green beans". Remember that many
of your readers are not native speakers of english.