Comprehensive and inviting, this guide to conceiving, testing, writing, and publishing recipes more than measures up to its title, offering a wealth of practical advice tailored for creating a host of recipe types (including specialized plant-based, gluten-free, and health and allergy conscious options) for any of today’s methods of sharing recipes with the world. That means that Sarazen—a dietician, chef, and food writer possessed of extraordinary communicative precision and power—lays out how to take an idea for a new recipe or an adaptation for an old one from soup to nuts, in a way that ensures a recipe is accurate, readable, and reproducible—a set of instructions that translates the act of cooking into words.” The Complete Recipe Writing Guide also demonstrates the process of testing a recipe, modifying its ingredients to meet a host of health and dietary specifications, and even—in thorough, illuminating chapters—how to present the finished product in photographs and video.

Like any good recipe writer, Sarazen understands her audience might not have access to top-of-the-line equipment, so she includes advice for how to showcase food on a smartphone. That spirit of approachability powers the book, which in many ways offers a recipe for the creation of recipes. To achieve this, Sarazen throughout explicates the practicalities of this highly technical form of writing, with style guides and guidance about organization, crafting ingredient lists, and anticipating readers’ understanding, expectations, and points of possible confusion.

But the writing’s only part of it. Setting this guide apart is Sarazen’s ambitious efforts to introduce, in its information-packed first six chapters, a baseline knowledge of the techniques, ingredients, equipment, and possibilities of recipes. From mastering yield conversions to knowing the difference between cornmeal, corn flour, polenta, and grits, the book abounds in practical tips, charts, lists, sidebars, worksheets, and above all else inspirational knowledge about the science and art of crafting and writing recipes for all audiences.

Takeaway: Thorough, marvelous guide to crafting and writing recipes for all diets.

Comparable Titles: Dianne Jacob’s Will Write for Food, Beata Lubas’s How to Photograph Food.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A