Just a little while ago, I asked what kind of language recipes were written in. Wikipedia tells us that a language is all about its symbols and its grammar; the little fiddly bits and how we put them together.

Therefore, when looking at a “Recipe Language,” it makes to think a little bit about the rules that apply, and the bits that they apply to.

In the same way that you can look at an English composition and say, “That is a good composition,” or “That is correct English”, you can also look at a recipe and say, “That is a good recipe,” or “That is a valid recipe.”

The rules are not the same rules which apply in English. In recipes, you’re allowed to ignore definite articles (“Mix flour with water”). A bulleted list of ingredients is expected in a recipe. If you wrote out the English equivalent, “The following ingredients are required: one teaspoon of vanilla extract, one quarter-teaspoon of salt, one large onion, 12 cloves of garlic, two cups of sugar and one package of bacon,” not only would it taste… special,  but people would look at the recipe with a quirked eyebrow.

They would accept it as a valid recipe, but they would prefer the standard bullet list of ingredients.

In English, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with “Grill parsley for 15 minutes or until it turns black” as an imperative. It’s perfectly correct. In a recipe, however, it labours under additional constraints.

In a recipe, you can’t talk about ingredients which haven’t been listed. If you write a recipe which includes the instruction, “Grill parsley 15min or until black” and you’ve only included bacon, sugar, garlic and onion in your ingredients,  it’s not a correct recipe. In a recipe, you can’t use all possible words, all the time. There are rules which govern when you can talk about parsley.

So what exactly makes a recipe so big and mighty that it can limit what I can talk about?

This is a long discussion that I’m going to try splitting up over blog posts.
But first…. Cookery!

Chinese Potato Salad

Ingredients

• 5-6 medium potatoes (about 2 1/2 pounds)
• 4 slices bacon, well-cooked and crumbled
• 3/4 cup chopped bok choy
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1/2 cup chopped green onion
• 1/4 cup chopped celantro

Sauce

• 1 1/3 cup mayonnaise
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tbs soy sauce
• 1-2 tsp sesame oil
• 1/8-1/4 tsp hot mustard powder
• 1/8 tsp salt

Boil the potatoes until cooked but still firm. Cut into potatosalad-sized chunks. Mix the ingredients for the sauce together,using more or less sesame oil and host mustard according to taste (the more the better, up to a point...). Put all solid ingredients together in a large bowl, then add the sauce and mix well. Chill.

Ajvar

Yield: 6 servings

• 2 lg Eggplants
• 6 lg Red or green sweet peppers
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1 Garlic clove; minced
• 1 Lemon; juiced
• 1/2 c Oil, preferably olive oil
• Parsley; minced

Bake eggplants and sweet peppers at 350 F until tender when pierced with a fork. Peel skin from hot vegetables and chop or mince the vegetables.Season to taste with salt and pepper and stir in the garlic and lemon juice. Gradually stir in as much of the oil as the vegetables will absorb. Mix well. Pile into a glass dish and sprinkle with parsley.

Boy, do I ever feel fancy, me and my blog posting of foreign recipes I stole from the internet. But I’m a sham; I haven’t tried making them, because I’m not really after them for the food. I’m after them for their language .
My question is, “Are these recipes written in English?”

My first reaction is, “Of course! If they weren’t, my sorry monolingual self wouldn’t be able to read them!”

But taking a closer look, I’m not certain that they are, in fact, I’m certain that they are not written in English. I have several convincing arguments. In English, lists of things, like frogs, trees, books or bloggers, are separated by commas (as I have just demonstrated). In English, “1 Garlic clove; minced”does not compute. Some of the words don’t seem to be real words. What is a ‘c’? A ‘tsp’? A ‘tbs’? An ‘lg’?

Even the most Englishlike bit isn’t really English. If it were English, shouldn’t “Bake eggplants” be “Bake the eggplants”? I’d write this off as a typo, except that it occurs all over the place.

Certainly the words used are all English words (or abbreviations thereof), and this should be enough to qualify a recipe as “English” for an “It’s not in French” definition of English. Perhaps the conclusion I should come to is that a recipe isn’t written in any kind of natural language.

If that’s the case, what kind of language is it written in?