Note: Program Notes
When is a narrative not a story? When it’s a recipe! Writing recipes with distinct sections listing the ingredients and preparation steps is a 19th century invention. Historically, recipes were just narrative prose. Can we leverage markup and style from those recipes to represent narrative recipes in a modern style?
Note: Acknowledgements
My thanks go again to all my friends and colleagues in kitchens, laboratories, and libraries, especially on BlueSky and Discord, for their help and suggestions, with a special mention to Beatrix Färber, Editor of the CELT Project; to culinary historian Regina Sexton of the Department of Adult Continuing Education, UCC; and to the late and very much missed Michael Sperberg-McQueen, whose valuable knowledge, especially of Middle German, was key to the adaptation of the recipe discussed.
Structure and narrative
Modern recipes, in print as on the web, contain two major components: a list of ingredients and a method. These were discussed extensively in the earlier papers on this topic [Flynn 2020a, Flynn 2021]. They exist in one form or another in every layout, design, schema, and handwritten note for modern recipes, and a recipe today would be considered virtually useless without both of them.
Figure 1: Simple recipes with list of ingredients and method in the modern style
| Ingredients | Method | Handwritten |
|---|---|---|
<ul> <li>1lb Sugar</li> <li>⅛pt Cream</li> <li>1 tin Evap</li> <li>2oz Butter</li> </ul>
|
<ol> <li>Mix ingredients</li> <li>Boil to 235°F</li> <li>Stir to cool to 140°</li> <li>Beat and pour into tin</li> </ol>
|
 |
Simplified recipe for fudge used as a markup example (Ingredients and Method) adapted from [Flynn 2020b] with the MS from a handwritten recipe book used as a source.
Before the expansion of the cookery book from niche publication to mass market during the second half of the 19th century, recipes were narrative [Scully 2002a, Rumminger 2018]. The Roman cookery writer Apicius used narrative, probably because the form was already ancient and the norm for descriptive writers, which continued for many centuries. The arrival of printing just made reproduction easier, so Marx Rumpolt, Hannah Glasse, and Marie-Antoine Carême felt no need to change the tradition of writing in narrative form [Figure 2]. With ingredients and method intertwined in narrative, it could be argued that the text itself is the method.
Figure 2: Narrative recipe examples with ingredients and method intertwined
Three examples of narrative recipes: the Rumpolt recipe for liver used in this paper, and two much later ones for turkey.
-
[Left] Gebratene Leber (№.5) from Marx Rumpolt’s Ein new Kochbuch of 1581, p.76 [Rumpolt 1581];
-
[Center] A Turkey, &c. in Jelly from Hannah Glasse’s The Art Of Cookery of 1753, p.258 [Glasse 1753];
-
[Right] Galantine of Turkey in Aspic, from Marie-Antoine Carême’s Le cuisinier parisien of 1828, p.145 [Carême 1828].
The early cookery authors like Rumpolt were writing for professional cooks with large kitchens and kitchen staff in wealthy houses: the cooks were assumed to be able to read, or have access to someone who could, and who knew enough to be able to decide on materials and quantities from experience. Like the modern Répertoire de la Cuisine for French cooking [Gringoire 1914], recipes were terse because that was all that was needed.
Hannah Glasse was an exception: she explicitly addressed the non-professional cook, and it is worth quoting her intent:
If I have not wrote in the high polite ſtyle, I hope ſhall be forgiven; for my intention is to inſtruct the lower ſort and therefore muſt treat them in their own way. For example: when I bid them lard a fowl, if I ſhould bid them lard with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant; but when I ſay they muſt lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean. So, in many other things in Cookery, the great cooks have ſuch a high way of expreſſing themſelves, that the poor girls are at a loſs to know what they mean:[…][Glasse 1753]
This all changed rapidly after the middle of the 19th century: Eliza Acton (1845) is usually credited with inventing the separation of Ingredients from Method, and her lead was followed by others including Isabella Beeton (1861) in England and Fanny Farmer (1896) in the USA; although Mrs Beeton notoriously gave ingredients but no quantities.
Implementation
An encounter with a German colleague with a copy of Rumpolt’s recipes from the 16th century resulted in a decision to try the ℞ techniques with narrative recipes. The recipe marked No.5 in [Figure 2] from the book by Rumpolt [Rumpolt 1581] was chosen because it seemed to have the qualities needed to test the system: a narrative for a simple dish, containing at least one mention of all the ingredients, in order, with details of what to do with each. No quantities are given apart from the bread, but they can be deduced according to the number of people eating. The original was scanned and a transcription composed and proofread. OCR was attempted with tesseract but was not successful; Transkribus was slightly better on the first few lines, but failed to complete the text.
The ℞ software was written with the modern structured recipe in mind. The development implementation is done in the custom recipe DTD used for decades for the author’s collection of recipes, both for historical convenience and for practical simplicity, but also to avoid the collection being placed in jeopardy by well-intentioned but uncontrollable third-party changes. To the best of the author’s knowledge there is no publicly-accepted schema or DTD for recipes in widespread use: many writers and publishers have invented their own, the present author included [Maler 1996, Flynn 1998]. As explained in the earlier papers, however, it was felt to be important to ensure that the key metadata was held only in attributes, so that ℞ functionality could easily be added to any schema or DTD of a user’s choosing.
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI: [Sperberg-McQueen 2002b] and [Burnard 2007]) provides a large and adaptable suite
of markup intended for the encoding and preservation of
historical documents in the Humanities. For a user, researcher,
or publisher wanting to encode a historical recipe in XML, the
TEI is an obvious choice instead of a proprietary DTD or a
bespoke schema, as TEI has been in widespread use in the markup
of historical documents for decades, and also has publisher and
software support. For the testing phase, the XML encoding was
applied in TEI P5 [Figure 3] by writing a shim to the
tei_all.dtd, because the attribute
declarations could simply be copied and pasted from the author’s
development environment. The arguments for and against the use
of DTDs vs schemas have been rehearsed too
many times to need reproducing here, but the choice in this case
was purely pragmatic: simplicity of editing, speed of
development, and the fact that publishers still depend on
DTDs, not W3C or RNG schemas. The TEI-conformant practice is to
generate a custom schema using ODD [TEI Consortium 2004], and this would remain the target for a
stable interchange implementation (see [section “Results and conclusions”]), but the current development environment
is experimental and a proof-of-concept within the author’s
collection, and is still subject to the constraints of that
environment.
Figure 3: Recipe encoded in TEI (before ℞ markup) with translation
<!DOCTYPE list SYSTEM "/dtds/tei/p5/tei_all.dtd">
<list>
<label>Gebratene Leber.</label>
<item>
<list rend="Method">
<item>Nim̄ die Leber</item>
<item>vnnd quell ſie in heiſſem Waſſer</item>
<item>buꜩ ſie fein ſauber auß</item>
<item>vnd ſteck ſie an ein holꜩern Spieß</item>
<item>ſampt dem Ma‧gen</item>
<item>leg ſie auff ein Roßt</item>
<item>vnd brat ſie geſchwindt hinweg.</item>
</list>
<list rend="Serving">
<item>Wenn du ſie wilt anrichten</item>
<item>ſo nim̄ gebehte Schnitten drey oder vier
in die Schüſſel</item>
<item>geuß darein ein gute Hennenbrüh</item>
<item>mit Petterſilgen Wurꜩel
geſotten.</item>
</list>
<list rend="Comment">
<item>Und wenn du haſt angerichtet</item>
<item>ſo leg ſie auff die Brüh</item>
<item>ſo iſt es gut vnd zierlich.</item>
</list>
</item>
</list>
|
Grilled Liver. Take the liver and rinse it in hot water clean it well out and stick it on a wooden skewer along with the stomach¹ lay it on the griddle and quickly grill it off. When you are ready to dress it lay 3–4 slices of toasted bread on the plate pour over a good chicken stock steeped with root-parsley. And when you have everything prepared lay it [the liver] on the stock so that it is good and dainty. ¹ Caul? |
As explained above, the categorization and measurement metadata required by ℞ is carried exclusively in attributes. This means that the relevant adaptations can be applied to any existing schema or DTD in a modification layer or shim without the need to rewrite any of the element type structure. This approach does, however, mean that one element type valid in mixed content must be otherwise unused in the encoding of this class of [recipe] document. Such an element type is therefore available for ‘hijacking’ (use for unintended purposes) to carry the ingredient metadata; and possibly another element type to carry the method metadata. In the case of narrative recipes, as noted earlier, the whole text may be the method.
Alternatively, if no unused element types are available, some additional attribute could be used to flag the instances when ingredient or recipe metadata is being carried on an element type in existing use. A new element type could be used in a new namespace, but implementors (encoders) in the target audience (publishers of recipe books) looking to test ℞ may not have the degree of freedom or corporate authority needed to make such modifications. If one or more of the ℞ attribute names themselves are already in use on a candidate element type in a target schema, some renaming in the code would be needed. A future version should probably armour the names or use parameterization or indirection. This is experimental software: permanent use would require more fundamental changes to be undertaken in formal procedures.
In the case of TEI, for the purposes of testing, the
material element type was chosen for the
ingredients. The attributes defined in ℞ were added via the shim
to the tei_all.dtd [Figure 5] using
the same enumerated attribute token list files of categories
used for the development system explained in [Flynn 2020a] ([Figure 5]). The TEI
Header is omitted in [Figure 4] for
brevity.
Figure 4: Recipe with ingredients marked in the
material element type
<!DOCTYPE list SYSTEM "recipe-tei.dtd">
<list>
<label n="5">Gebratene Leber.</label>
<item>
<list type="Method">
<item>Nim̄ die <material quantity="500" unit="g" meat="veal"
part="liver" xml:id="liver">Leber</material></item>
<item>vnnd quell ſie in <material quantity="1" unit="ℓ"
basic="water" treatment="hand-hot"
xml:id="water">heiſſem Waſſer</material></item>
<item>buꜩ ſie fein ſauber auß</item>
<item>vnd ſteck ſie an ein holꜩern Spieß</item>
<item>ſampt dem <material quantity="1" meat="veal" part="stomach"
xml:id="magen">Ma‧gen</material></item>
<item>leg ſie auff ein Roßt</item>
<item>vnd brat ſie geſchwindt hinweg.</item>
</list>
<list rend="Serving">
<item>Wenn du ſie wilt anrichten</item>
<item>ſo nim̄ <material quantity="3–4" unit="slice" quality="white"
basic="bread" treatment="warmed" xml:id="bread">gebehte
Schnitten drey oder vier</material> in die Schüſſel</item>
<item>geuß darein ein gute <material quantity="150" unit="ml"
meat="chicken" part="stock"
xml:id="stock">Hennenbrüh</material></item>
<item>mit <material quantity="25" unit="g"
vegetable="root-parsley" treatment="grated and cooked in
the stock" xml:id="parsley">Petterſilgen Wurꜩel</material>
geſotten.</item>
</list>
<list rend="Comment">
<item>Und wenn du haſt angerichtet</item>
<item>ſo leg ſie auff die Brüh</item>
<item>ſo iſt es gut vnd zierlich.</item>
</list>
</item>
</list>
The TEI Header has been omitted from this fragment for space reasons.
The curly ‘ℓ’ (ell) is an alternative to the normal lowercase ‘l’ for liters in because the normal ‘l’ may be mistaken for a digit 1 in some fonts.
The resulting TEI document (with some site-associated decoration) was enabled in the author’s recipe site. The advantage of using XML in the same format as all the other recipes ([Figure 5]) is that the process of checking remains the same because the same attribute names are used.
The markup of cooking equipment was originally considered in recipes on the author’s site, but not pursued as the recipes were intended for the experienced cook in a well-equipped kitchen. However, as TEI explicitly caters for descriptive markup, it would be possible to co-opt an additional element type to mark equipment in a similar manner to ingredients.
Figure 5: The shim implementing the attributes for the ingredient metadata, with an example list
<!ENTITY % tei SYSTEM "/dtds/tei/p5/tei_all.dtd"> <!ENTITY % alcohol-list SYSTEM "alcohol.list"> <!ENTITY % basic-list SYSTEM "basic.list"> <!ENTITY % beans-list SYSTEM "beans.list"> <!ENTITY % dairy-list SYSTEM "dairy.list"> <!ENTITY % form-list SYSTEM "form.list"> <!ENTITY % fruit-list SYSTEM "fruits.list"> <!ENTITY % herb-list SYSTEM "herbs.list"> <!ENTITY % meat-list SYSTEM "meat.list"> <!ENTITY % nature-list SYSTEM "nature.list"> <!ENTITY % nuts-list SYSTEM "nuts.list"> <!ENTITY % seeds-list SYSTEM "seeds.list"> <!ENTITY % part-list SYSTEM "parts.list"> <!ENTITY % pasta-list SYSTEM "pasta.list"> <!ENTITY % seafood-list SYSTEM "seafood.list"> <!ENTITY % sizes-list SYSTEM "sizes.list"> <!ENTITY % spice-list SYSTEM "spices.list"> <!ENTITY % sprinkles-list SYSTEM "sprinkles.list"> <!ENTITY % vegetable-list SYSTEM "vegetables.list"> <!ENTITY % langs-list SYSTEM "langs.LIST"> <!ENTITY % package-list SYSTEM "packages.LIST"> <!ENTITY % units-list SYSTEM "units.LIST"> The TEI DTD is declared as a parameter
entity for later use. The units, weights,
and ingredient categorization token list
files are declared as general entities
(right-hand column) and invoked for
each attribute (left-hand column).
The dummy termination |
<!ATTLIST material quantity CDATA #IMPLIED unit (%units-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED unit-weight CDATA #IMPLIED container (%package-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED size (%sizes-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED colour CDATA #IMPLIED quality CDATA #IMPLIED nature (%nature-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED meat (%meat-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED seafood (%seafood-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED part (%part-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED dairy (%dairy-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED fruit (%fruit-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED alcohol (%alcohol-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED herb (%herb-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED vegetable (%vegetable-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED bean (%beans-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED nut (%nuts-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED seed (%seeds-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED pasta (%pasta-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED spice (%spice-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED basic (%basic-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED sprinkles (%sprinkles-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED form (%form-list;OMIT) #IMPLIED prep CDATA #IMPLIED treatment CDATA #IMPLIED note (1|2|3) #IMPLIED comment CDATA #IMPLIED symbol CDATA #IMPLIED alt CDATA #IMPLIED calories CDATA #IMPLIED status (optional|required) #IMPLIED> %tei; linseed| pumpkin| sesame| sunflower| tahini| |
The document was transformed to the same HTML format as all
the other recipes in the author’s collection by adapting the
existing XSLT to handle the TEI element types. This consisted
largely of adding the TEI element type names as unions to the
existing XPaths in the match attributes of the
relevant XSL-templates. The resulting web page is online at
https://xml.silmaril.ie/recipes/grilled-liver.html
and the source (which also serves as the print version, using
CSS as in [Flynn 2021]) is at https://xml.silmaril.ie/recipes/grilled-liver.xml [Figure 6].
Figure 6: The recipe in TEI displayed in a recipe web site in display format (L) and print format (R)
On a practical note, the reuse of the metadata from all recipes is a key feature of most collections. Extraction or direct reference enables the classification of recipes, and the application of the ingredient details to translation and indexing, as well as checking for allergens and other specifics. None of these has been implemented here yet, but [Figure 7] illustrates an example ad hoc extraction from the command line.
Figure 7: Metadata from the recipe, showing a list of ingredients extracted for further use
<material xml:id="liver" meat="veal" part="liver" unit="g" quantity="500">Leber</material> <material xml:id="water" basic="water" unit="ℓ" quantity="1">Waſſer</material> <material xml:id="magen" meat="veal" part="stomach" quantity="1">Ma‧gen</material> <material xml:id="bread" basic="bread" quality="white" unit="slice" quantity="3–4" treatment="toasted">gebehte Schnitten drey oder vier</material> <material xml:id="stock" meat="chicken" part="stock" unit="ml" quantity="150">Hennenbrüh</material> <material xml:id="parsley" herb="parsley" part="root" unit="g" quantity="25" treatment="chopped">Petterſilgen Wurꜩel</material>
Metadata extracted with the command lxgrep material liver.xml for use in checking, indexing, and other
analyses (lxgrep is part of the
LT-XML2 utilities from the Language Technology Group in
Edinburgh).
Results and conclusions
This part of the ℞ development has been another learning curve:
|
Encoding |
The process of encoding was relatively straightforward, much of which is due to the accessibility and adaptability of the TEI, its documentation, and the copious provision of element types. There is always an degree of chance in selecting element types for this kind of temporary ‘abuse’, in that someone, somewhere, will be depending absolutely on the unmodified existence of the very one that you have chosen to carry your metadata. In my experience, however, it is a rare TEI document that, from the many modules available, uses all 32,768 element types available in mixed content. As mentioned in [section “Implementation”] above, a namespace could be used to distinguish a new element type. |
|
Implementation |
The adaptation of the existing web site XSLT to process a TEI document instead of the homebrew recipe schema used for development was also unproblematic, as both follow the traditional structured document concepts of heading—metadata—sectioning found in other systems [Flynn 2017]. |
|
Alternative approaches |
The TEI Consortium provides ODD [TEI Consortium 2004], a language for modifying the TEI schema (or indeed any schema), so it could be used to create a specialist vocabulary for recipes which would still conform to the TEI Guidelines. The current implementation is an experiment, and pretends to no such conformity. The ODD method should be used for a formal publication project, for example one encoding large numbers of recipes such as the entire Rumpolt book; and it would also be a route to use for commercial or other more permanent publication. The author is interested to hear of TEI encodings of recipes as part of other projects. |
|
Still to do |
The astute reader will have noticed that the formal list of ingredients is missing from the print version of the test recipe in [Figure 6] (R). The fully-formatted page in [Figure 6] (L) is generated by XSLT, so performing a collation of the ingredients to populate the list programmatically is possible. But the print view is (by design, on this site) raw XML with CSS, as this was the original requirement for the author’s collection. Performing the CSS collation has been possible for recipes using the regular DTD, as they occur inline to the normal progression of events. Doing it out-of-line (using CSS) for a narrative recipe needs further work, which is ongoing. |
The current experiment was a proof-of-concept, and has been mainly successful. If anyone has recipes encoded in, for example, DocBook or JATS, I would be interested to hear from them.
References
[Burnard 2007] Burnard, Lou and Bauman, Syd (2007). Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Text Consortium, REV:f73186978, URI:
https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html
.
[Carême 1828] Carême, Marie-Antoine (1828). Le cuisinier parisien. Published Gallerie de Bossange Père, Paris, 480pp., URI:
https://archive.org/details/b29298581/page/n7/mode/2up
.
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.
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.
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https://slicesofbluesky.com/the-evolution-of-recipe-writing-style/
.
[Rumpolt 1581] Rumpolt, Marx (1581). Ein new Kochbuch. Sigmundt Fenerabendt, Peter Fischer, and Heinrich Tacken, Frankfurt an Main, 520pp.,
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.
[Scully 2002a] Scully, D Eleanor and Scully, Terence Peter (2002). Early French Cookery. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 377pp., ISBN:9780472088775, DOI:https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14570, URI:
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