Recipes.  A broad genre of work, they can involve everything from a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich to a complicated turducken.  Although varying in content, their purpose remains the same: to give instructions on how to synthesize ingredients and create a food.  Sometimes, they include a spin to a certain direction: cheaper foods, luxury items, authentic cultural cooking, homestyle, and many more, but they always are written to instruct.  Often, they include an introduction, a list of ingredients, a set of steps, and a photograph to illustrate what the finished product should look like.  However, sometimes these are omitted: for instance,  Marco Canora’s “How to Make Gnocchi” leaves out an ingredient list. Recipes use multiple step structures, for instance, they could be written as numerical steps, in bubbles of instruction, or occasionally in one large block of text.  This affects how people navigate the recipe, along with many other factors: sometimes, different parts of the text are written in different sizes of font indicating  varying levels of importance.  For instance, the biggest text is the name of the dish, the ingredient list and steps are in the middle, and the smallest is the yield.

Cookbooks and recipe websites usually include a plethora of recipes, organized by type of food (appetizers, main entrees, desserts) or by cuisine (American, French, Italian, etc). Sometimes, recipes are made as adaptations of others, for instance, Maricel Presilla’s “Grandmother Paquita’s Chunky Calabaza Puree” in Gran Cocina Latina.  The audience for recipes includes, simply, people who desire to make their own foods.  Often, this person is an upper middle class homemaker, but some cookbooks appeal to others. For example, Brown’s Good and Cheap book is targeted towards people looking for simple and inexpensive meals, such as people who are newly on their own and looking to budget their money.  Also, Σουηδός Μάγειρας’s “Old Fashioned Sokolatina”, published on cooklikegreeks.com, appeals to another audience: people who want to create an authentic cultural dish.

Recipes should, to be of good quality, include clear and detailed instruction to make the process of making the dish as foolproof as possible.  Bad recipes are often hard to follow, not well explained, and result in lots of mistakes.

Recipes, in general, serve one united purpose: to portray to an audience how to make food.  Although the format in which this is done varies from author to author, all food writing is essentially similar.  Recipes exist to inform and share information about one of the most integral parts of human life: preparing and eating food.