On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 18:37:35 -0500, Olve Utne utne@nvg.org wrote:
A well-written recipe is, in my opinion, a very valuable part of a food article. When that is said, it is of course essential from a lexicographic point of view that:
- It is clear that the recipe is a description rather than proscription.
- The provided recipe/s is/are reasonably representative for the tradition
in question. 3) Common variations are listed in the recipe/s. 4) It is made clear what the general source for the provided recipe is.
Also, some recipes are very loosely defined, whilst others are by nature extremely fine-tuned. The provided examples (recipes) will, if properly written, help make this clear.
And this is where I see the problem. It is my opinion that *almost all* recepies should be loosely defined on Wikipedia. And a real recepy is *almost always* extremely fine-tuned.
Wikipedia should describe what the world is, what things are. Not be prescriptive in what one should be doing. The article on food products should specify what's in them and how they are made, but a recipe is not a good way to do so. Just like the table article does not specify which length the legs of a table should be,
I beg to differ: It is essential information to mention the difference in leg length of a diningroom table as opposed to a sofa table.
I'd say we mention the table heights rather than the leg lengths, but the more important part is how we tell that. "A kitchen table has a height such that it reaches approximately an adult's middle (ca. 80 cm)" (don't quote me on the exact number). Not: "If you want to make a kitchen table, start by getting four pieces of wood of 69x4x4 cm each."
the arancini article should not specify what filling should be in or how long it should be fried.
Maybe not. But that depends on what arancini-like foods one needs to distinguish arancini from in a contrastive perspective. It also depends on what the actual cultural criteria are for how much variation there can be in the preparation before the result is no longer considered to be arancini. (Which is not to say that the resulting non-arancini need to be inferior in any way. They just happen to be something-else-than-arancini.)
I agree totally. But the piece I reacted to had said itself already that there is a wide range in fillings. Which means we should specify the range rather than choose 1 or 2 or 10 from it and give those in details.
Andre Engels