Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
Consider the passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition which I will present later below. The whole article about the telegraph is full of detailed circuit diagrams and mechanical diagrams at a level which goes _far_ beyond the schematic illustration of basic principles. Much of the Britannica 11th is at what might be called the engineering-handbook level of depth and detail. From the information given in "Telegraph" article, you could almost build a "Varley's Double Cup insulator," or wire up a sounder for duplex working by either the differential method or the bridge method.
Something to consider is that as the total volume of knowledge has increased, the publishers of print encyclopedias have had to make some hard choices about what to include and what to leave out. (Of course, they gloss over that, it sounds so - so - *tradesman*-like.) The oldest encyclopedias seem to have a lot of recipe-like and other mundane details (like preferred techniques for catching different kinds of fish), but over time scientific, geographic, and historical information would have tended to crowd out less-critical material, since it would have been impossible to sell 500-volume print encyclopedias.
On recipes specifically, I suspect that some of the objection is to recipes with no supporting content. To me, a bald recipe for chocolate cake is like a substub or an uncaptioned picture; I want to know who thought of chocolate cake first, why some have flour and some don't, etc. Auntie B's recipe is not encyclopedic for the same reason that Auntie B herself isn't, there's just not much to say, but it would make a fine "illustration" for the chocolate cake article:
'''Chocolate cake''' is [[cake]] containing [[chocolate]]. First mentioned in a Dutch cookbook of 1675, [etc].
The following recipe is from Fannie Farmer ca 1921:
<recipe1>
A more modern recipe:
<recipe2>
Now is anybody going to want to come along and delete the recipes from such an article?
Stan