Recipe Tables
Less scrolling, more cooking. Turn any recipe into one table you can read at a glance, and keep every one you make. The recipe, redesigned →
“A recipe is a set of parallel processes with timing and dependencies. For five hundred years, we’ve written it down as a story. Stories are read start to finish, once, sitting down.
Cooking doesn’t work like that. You stand, you juggle three things at different stages, your hands are wet, and the one fact you need,what goes into this pan, right now, is buried in paragraph four, two screens away from the ingredient list. So you scroll. Up to the amounts, down to the step, up again because you forgot whether the butter was melted or softened. The format fights the activity it exists to serve. That’s not a complaint about recipe writers. It’s a complaint about a format: one nobody chose, one inherited from the cookbook and pasted onto the web unchanged. In 2004, an engineer named Michael Chu quietly fixed it.
On his blog, Cooking for Engineers, he drew each recipe as a table: ingredients down the left, in the order they’re used; each step a cell spanning exactly the things it combines; everything converging, column by column, into one finished dish. The whole recipe in one look. No scrolling, no re-reading, no wondering which bowl. He drew every one by hand, and for twenty years that’s roughly where the idea stayed. We automated it. This is what it looks like..”