Tabular recipes

A tabular recipe is a recipe drawn as a grid instead of written as prose: the ingredients are the rows, each step is a cell spanning exactly the ingredients it combines, and the cells merge left to right until the last one spans everything — the finished dish. Nothing is left out; it is the same recipe, laid out so the structure is visible. Here is one.

Four properties, and all four have to hold:

• Ingredients are rows, ordered by first use — not by the order the original wrote them, and not alphabetically. Read the column downward and you have your mise en place in the order you will touch it.
• Steps are columns, and a cell spans the rows it acts on. A cell covering butter and sugar means cream those two. The geometry says what “the mixture” refers to, so you never reconstruct it.
• Cells merge as you move right, each one absorbing whatever earlier cells produced. Two components that stay separate until the end appear as two stacks that only meet near the right edge.
• The rightmost cell spans everything. That convergence is the test: if the grid does not end in one cell, it is not describing one dish.

The consequence is that the shape of the table is the recipe. You can see before you start which steps never interact, what can run while the oven works, and where everything joins.

Plenty of recipes contain tables without being tabular, and the distinction is worth having because it is the whole point of the format.

• An ingredients table — a two-column list of quantities beside names — encodes no structure. It tells you what to buy, not what joins what.
• A numbered method in a box is prose with a border. Steps in sequence are still steps in sequence; nothing about a step says which ingredients it touches.
• A scaling or conversion table — half, double, cups to grams — is a table attached to a recipe, not a recipe as a table.

The one test that settles it: can you point at a step and see, without reading a word, exactly which ingredients go into it? If yes, it is tabular. If you have to trace back through the prose to find out, it is a recipe with a table in it.

Take the banana bread above. Written out, it runs: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, mash the bananas separately, stir the vanilla into them, combine that with the butter mixture, whisk the flour with the baking soda and salt, fold the dry into the wet, bake for an hour.

That paragraph is not badly written, and it is still work to read. “Combine that” needs you to remember two things. “The dry” needs you to remember three more. You cannot tell at a glance that the bananas and the flour are two independent branches that could be done in either order, or by two people.

In the table, all of that is geometry. The two branches are two stacks. The merge is one cell. Nothing has to be held in your head, which matters most at the point where your hands are covered in butter and you have lost your place.

The format has more names than users. Michael Chu, who invented it at Cooking for Engineers in 2004, calls it a recipe summary table, or Tabular Recipe Notation — TRN. “Tabular recipe” is the shorthand most people reach for once they have seen one and want to find more.

Everything else is description rather than a name: recipe grid, recipe chart, the engineer recipe format, “recipes as a Gantt chart”. The Gantt comparison is the closest of them — time runs left to right and a cell spanning three rows means those three things are now one thing — but a Gantt chart is scheduling and this is dependency, so it only takes you so far.

Chu drew every one of his by hand, as raw HTML, and then almost nobody copied him for twenty-two years. The reason is not that the format is hard to understand — it teaches itself in one look — but that producing one is genuinely tedious. Reordering the ingredients by first use and working out which cell spans what takes real thought per recipe, and no amount of enthusiasm gets you through a hundred of them.

There is also a piece of folklore that kept people off it: a “patent pending” notice sat on the format for two decades. Chu has confirmed it never went anywhere — it stayed up because he forgot to take it down.

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, and you get a tabular recipe back in about fifteen seconds — ingredients reordered by first use, cells spanned correctly, in the recipe's own language. You can then tick steps off as you cook, scale it, and switch between cups and grams.

If you would rather draw one yourself, the rules for building one by hand are written out, and the three rules for reading one go deeper than the summary above. For the originals, read Cooking for Engineers — the format is Chu's, and his are still the best-written ones.