Years ago, I made a stray comment to my students at Yale: “You know, the best model for explaining and process is the recipe.”
It makes sense. A recipe has to break the process down into simple steps. A recipe also has to get the sequence right. You can’t mix the eggs for an omelet until you break the crack the shell.
As the semester drew to a close, one student challenged me. “If recipes are such great models for writing,” she said, “let’s cook something together.”
So we reserved a kitchen in a dorm and someone found a recipe for an apple pie. I brought a recorder and made a foolish promise.
“If we talk about what we’re doing, and why, at every step of the process, we’ll end up with a first good draft,” I said. “You can actually talk out the first draft of almost anything you write, as long as you break it into steps.”
When we gathered, the instigator talked about her grandmother’s love of cooking and how she passed it on to her family. Other students piped in with stories about family cooking memories. Not a bad start.
Then we started mixing ingredients, preheating the oven, preparing the pie tin. We made a crust, then put the apples, raising, cinnamon, sugar, and other ingredients together.
Someone talked about the oven’s heat.
Someone took my recorder and interviewed other students about their attitudes about food and cooking. People talked about diets. Some people waxed poetic about the emotional response to entering a house while food bakes.
And the room filled with the aroma of homemade pie. These sophisticated college students, from all over the world, who had talked about all kinds of tough issues in their papers all semester softened.
If Michael Pollan had entered the room, he would have been proud. The students turned an ordinary event—cooking a pie—into an intelligent essay on the culture of food.
Then we talked about the end-of-semester blues, and how different moods affect attitude toward food. A few people confessed that they lost their discipline at the end of the semester and ate rank junk food that they would never consider at the beginning of the semester.
Finally, the pie came out of the oven. It was getting late. People had other places to be—classes, meetings, clubs, sports. We each took a slice. As we cleaned up, we continued talking into the recorder. Something about how the job is never done till the place is put back into order.
When I got home, I listened to the recording. Turned out I was right. A transcript of that event could have been a strong first draft. The piece would need some work. We’d have to figure out what point we were trying to make. We’d have to develop some ideas more fully and drop some meaningless asides.
But the recipe recipe works. Here’s why.
Too often, writers work to cram too many ideas, too soon, into their writing. They feel like they don’t have time to say everything they want to say.
The origin of this problem, I think, is school assignments. The introductory paragraph has to state the thesis, the supporting arguments for the thesis, and maybe even the significance of the topic.
Even when they know about a topic, readers have a limited capacity to take in new thoughts. In a series of psychology experiments in the 1950s, George Miller found that humans can only remember seven items at a time. The “scratchpad” that is our shortterm memory simply can’t hold any more. That’s why, legend has it, telephone numbers were seven digits long.
But experts on the brain say that our shortterm memory is actually a lot less. Some say we can only hold three ideas in our head at the same time. Others say that, actually, it’s . . . one. We can jump back and forth along , say, three ideas. But we can only focus on one at a time. And the parade of ideas makes sense only when they come in some logical sequence.
The genius of the recipe approach to writing is twofold. As a chef, you can only do one thing at a time: measure ingredients, sift flour, butter pan, chop apples, and so on. And you have to do them in the right order. You can’t scramble an egg until you break it, right?
Next time you have something complex to explain—how nuclear licensing works, how to code a website, how to close a sale, how to get to Aunt Tillie’s house in North Carolina—make it a recipe.