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?