The Cooking for Engineers recipe format

Every recipe at Cooking for Engineers ends the same way: after the photographs and the method, the whole recipe again as one table. Ingredients down the left, steps across the top, cells merging left to right until a single cell spans everything. Michael Chu has drawn one of those for every recipe he has published since 2004, and the layout is the reason people remember the site. This page explains how it works, and how to make one yourself. If you were looking for his recipes, they are at the link above; this isn't his site.

The table above is a banana bread in that format. Everything about the layout comes from four rules, and once you know them you can read any of Chu's tables, or draw your own.

• Ingredients are the rows, ordered by first use. Not the order the recipe listed them and not alphabetically. Read down the left column and you have your prep in the order you will touch it.
• Each step is a column, left to right in cooking order. The cell holds the action: cream, beat in, fold, bake 60 min.
• A step's cell spans exactly the rows it acts on. A cell covering butter and sugar means cream those two, and nothing else. Once ingredients have been combined they travel together, so every later step that touches the mixture spans all of their rows.
• The last column spans every row.That cell is the finished dish. If it doesn't reach a row, an ingredient never made it in, which is the format proofreading the recipe for you.

The consequence is that the shape of the table is the recipe. Two components that stay separate until the end show up as two stacks that only meet near the right edge. You can see, before you start, what can happen while the oven heats and where everything joins.

The grid itself is nothing special. Any spreadsheet or word processor can draw it; merged cells are the only feature you need. Three ingredients and three steps, with one merge, looks like this:

Fill it in by working through the recipe step by step: list each ingredient the first time a step needs it, give the step a column, and merge its cell across the rows it uses. Where a step uses something an earlier step already produced, span all of that mixture's rows. The last column is always one cell. A worked example, glazed carrots, is here, and the rules in more depth are in how to format a recipe as a table.

A recipe summary table, or Tabular Recipe Notation. Most readers never learn either name, which is why the format gets searched for by description: the engineer recipe format, the recipe grid, recipes as a Gantt chart. The Gantt comparison is the closest of those. Sequence runs left to right and a cell spanning three rows means those three things are now one thing, although a Gantt chart tracks time and this tracks combination, so it only takes you so far.

No. A “patent pending” notice sat on the format for twenty years and put a lot of people off copying it. Chu has since confirmed the application never went anywhere and the notice stayed up because he forgot to take it down. You can use the layout.

Chu drew each table by hand, in a text editor, as raw HTML, and in twenty years that discipline produced a few hundred of them. The drawing is not the hard part. The hard part is reordering the ingredients by first use and working out which cells span what, fresh for every recipe. That is a satisfying puzzle once and a project nobody finishes at a hundred, which is the whole reason a format this good stayed this rare.

The tedious part is the part a machine is good at. That is what this site does: paste a link, the recipe text, or a photo of a cookbook page into RecipeTables and you get the recipe back in this format in about fifteen seconds, ingredients reordered by first use and cells spanned correctly. You can then scale it, switch between cups and grams, and tick steps off as you cook.

Browse tables other people have made to see the format across hundreds of real recipes. And read the originals at Cooking for Engineers. The format is his, and his tables are still the best-written ones.