Recipe summary tables

If you have seen a recipe drawn as a grid — ingredients down the left, each step a cell spanning exactly the things it combines, everything converging into one finished dish — you have seen a recipe summary table. It was invented in 2004 by an engineer named Michael Chu, and almost nobody has copied it since.

This isn't that site — you probably want cookingforengineers.com, where Michael Chu has been publishing these tables since June 2004. That is where the originals are, and they are worth reading.

RecipeTables is a separate tool, built by someone else, that turns any recipe into the same kind of table. The rest of this page is about the format itself: what it's called, how it works, and why it stayed rare for twenty-two years.

Chu calls them recipe summary tables, or Tabular Recipe Notation— TRN. Most people who love the format have never heard either name, which is why it gets described rather than named: “that recipe grid”, “the engineer recipe thing”, “recipes as a Gantt chart”.

The Gantt comparison is the one that sticks, and it is close to right. Time runs left to right, ingredients are the rows, and a cell spanning three rows means those three things are now one thing.

Three rules cover it:

• Ingredients run down the left, in the order they are first used — not the order a cupboard would suggest.
• Each column to the right is a step, and a step's cell spans exactly the rows it acts on. Two ingredients creamed together share one cell.
• Columns merge as you go right, until the last one spans everything. That final cell is the finished dish, and the shape of the merging IS the recipe's structure — you can see which things are separate components and where they join.

The consequence is that you can read a whole recipe in one look instead of scrolling, re-reading, and wondering which bowl was which. A fuller walkthrough is here, and if you want to draw one yourself, the rules for building one by hand are the next guide over.

Chu drew every table by hand, in a text editor, as raw HTML. That is the whole explanation for why a format this good stayed this rare: the hard part isn't the drawing, it is reordering the ingredients by first use and working out which cells span what. Doing that by hand for one recipe takes real thought. Doing it for a hundred is a project nobody finishes.

There is also a small piece of folklore worth clearing up. A “patent pending” notice sat on the format for two decades and put people off copying it. Chu has since confirmed it never went anywhere — it stayed up because he forgot to take it down.

The format resurfaced in 2026 and went round the internet properly for the first time, which is probably how you got here. Chu, for what it's worth, seems delighted about it.

The only thing that has genuinely changed since 2004 is that the tedious part can now be automated. That is what this site does: paste a link, the text, or a photo of a cookbook page, and you get a recipe summary table back — ingredients reordered by first use, cells spanned correctly, in about fifteen seconds.

Try it on a recipe you already cook, or browse tables other people have made. And read the originals at Cooking for Engineers — this format is his, and his are still the best-written ones.