alt.gourmand editorial policies (last updated 24 July 1987)
Brian Reid
issues of spelling and grammar and style, there are some specific editorial
policies that I enforce on recipes. Some of the early recipes that were sent
out do not meet all of these criteria, but I'm trying to improve the
editorial quality of alt.gourmand by being more strict with the newer recipes.
I am always happy to discuss (by electronic mail) requests to be exempted
from any of these policies.
* 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 or ovo-lacto-vegetarianism, 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. For example, some of Paul Prudhomme's recipes call for both fresh
garlic and garlic powder because the taste is different. But in general I
will challenge the use of convenience ingredients in the published recipes.
* No brand names or per-package measurements. Perhaps your grandmother's
recipe for chicken soup called for "1 box of Ajax", but the average reader in
Japan or New Zealand isn't going to know what Ajax 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%. In making soup
you can usually be wrong by a factor of 100% and it will come out just fine.
* 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.
* No recipes that you or your family or friends haven't tried. If you send me
a recipe that begins "I cut this out of the Sunday newspaper because it
looked interesting, but I haven't tried it yet. It's probably very yummy" I
will file it away in a "use only in desperation" directory. I want recipes
that you use and like, not recipes that you clipped from some ink-and-paper
version of alt.gourmand.
* No vulgar language. From time to time somebody submits a recipe that begins
"This is the best fucking chili you will ever taste" or that is entitled
"Broccoli orgasm casserole". It's fun to talk that way, but when you write
with such low-class words the humor goes away and the earthiness becomes
tastelessness. If you want to learn how to write about food so that you are
titillating without being vulgar, go read "Alice, Let's Eat!" by Calvin
Trillin. If you learn how to be erotic without being vulgar, you should be
writing novels and not recipes.