I tried to build a little recipe DB along these lines years ago. What I ended up finding is that as I improved in my own food preparation skills, my interest in super-rigid recipes of this form diminished.
Basically, there's just a lot of slush and room for experimentation in cooking. Think about making a stir fry— how many people would level off exact masses of different vegetables to combine in perfect proportion? Never! You toss in what looks good and that's that. As you gain confidence, this approach spreads out to cover marinades, sauces, salads, breads, baking, etc, etc. You're not looking at recipes because you intend to follow them exactly, but because you're trolling for ideas of new combinations, or new preparation methods, or whatever.
The prose is valuable, because that's where that subtlety is communicated. It's the author saying stuff like: "I know this sounds weird, but do X until Y and then gently add Z and you'll be surprised what a great flavour develops."
Authors like Mark Bittman and Deb Perelman are perfect examples of this. Sure, you might make the odd thing from them exactly as written, but that's not really why you're there. I think treating food preparation as equivalent to a Vagrantfile would really lose something along the way.
Basically, there's just a lot of slush and room for experimentation in cooking. Think about making a stir fry— how many people would level off exact masses of different vegetables to combine in perfect proportion? Never! You toss in what looks good and that's that. As you gain confidence, this approach spreads out to cover marinades, sauces, salads, breads, baking, etc, etc. You're not looking at recipes because you intend to follow them exactly, but because you're trolling for ideas of new combinations, or new preparation methods, or whatever.
The prose is valuable, because that's where that subtlety is communicated. It's the author saying stuff like: "I know this sounds weird, but do X until Y and then gently add Z and you'll be surprised what a great flavour develops."
Authors like Mark Bittman and Deb Perelman are perfect examples of this. Sure, you might make the odd thing from them exactly as written, but that's not really why you're there. I think treating food preparation as equivalent to a Vagrantfile would really lose something along the way.