I have always been of the opinion that recipies/howtos/instructions are perfectly fine for wikipedia. Wiki is not paper, after all, and knowledge about how to do things is knowledge.
I don't buy the argument that recipes are inherently POV. First of all, it's a bit odd to think of a recipe as potentially biased, isn't it? I suppose it's possible for one to be biased about a recipe "This is the only proper way to boil an egg". But it's also entirely possible to be NPOV, by giving alternate methods in the same article or in different articles.
Britannica has 66,000 articles, I believe. It seems likely that in en: alone, we will have 10x that many within a few more years. Even if we stick to "traditional conventions" about what belongs in an encyclopedia, our superior production methods mean that we can have 10x their coverage. But if we understand that wiki is not paper, I can imagine us having 100x their coverage.
I'm not a dogmatist on this point (recipes), I'm just throwing out for consideration -- what exactly makes this non-encyclopedic, other than the constraints of paper on traditional encyclopedias?
--Jimbo