How to Title Recipes
May 16th, 2009 by Colin
Bethany just turned to me, as I was happily facing-book, going-daddy, and brainstorming about the evolution of ENFPConsulting, and said, “I’d like you to go onto my blog and write about How to Title Recipes.” And thus we are.
Long before I read Seth Godin’s How to Title Stuff or Alex Witze’s SAA: How to title your paper I myself went to college, and there spent a lot of time mocking firsthand the evolution of sassy subtitles. Back in the day you would write a man’s title for your paper: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” There was only one subtitle, which was “My paper,” and beyond 6th grade it was implied. Now every paper has a subtitle, and every student apparently plays Rock Paper Scissors to decide on which line to put the real title and on which to put the joke-title. The youngest undergraduates have never seen a real title on either line. The portfolio-generation only knows to put their name and an unpronounceable symbol representing their feelings. Even the Ph.D.s don’t go beyond “Tom Saw… what?: Visual Imagery in Twain’s Eleventh Book.” And when those kids get out of school and quit writing papers gratia commentarii, they title everything in the only way they know how. Grown up they wield a billion dollars to take a drug to market, then name it Abilify or The Purple Pill. Demonstrative names are passé–marketing requires feelings and impressions. Cars, chidren, recipes…
Imitating one’s grandma or her pies is old fashioned now. So for every child named “Boyce” there is a correlative apple pie christened “Freestyle Fuji: The Motion Streusel.” If you look in a recipe book for “apple pie,” more often than not you’ll be sent to the impressionistically “apple pie -ish” section (because who looks under “freestyle”?) If it’s a hip book, nothing in that section will use the word “pie,” and rarely will it use the word “apple.” Ask a waitress what kind of pies they have for dessert and she’s just as likely to say “Rustic Autumn” as “apple.” A bit of that is understandable–specialization generates perceived value, funky ingredients generate perceived value, and everyone wants a memorable name to prove that imitating oneself is the highest form of self-flattery. The naming schemes that once were reserved for restaurants in San Francisco (“Slalom”, “Maisonchienne”, “Shack!”) have now mated with your friendly neighborhood meatloaf.
As such I remind the world of the following dessert-taxonomy equation from the Bethanyology Manual of Style:
Author + Adjective1 + Main Ingredient by Weight + Adjective2
* There must be at least one adjective, and at least one adjective must reference a desciptor, common to the region, of the style of cooking.
The BMOS taxonomy is what most cookbook publishers use, partially because it allows a lot of leverage. So “Grandma Becky’s Rustic Rhubarb Flambé” is pretty far out there, but no less legal than “Mary’s fried chicken.” The moving streusel referenced above is more properly rendered “Slalom’s Fuji Apple Pie.” (Some restaurant review guides, in 2009, will allow “Slalom presents… Fuji Apple Pie.) But notice the name, which shows humility because it does not vainly pretend that this is the definitive pie, but Slalom’s entry into an established and rotund corpus. Subtitles are still allowed, as are descriptors on a menu, so you do have quite a wide range of freedom if your marketing absolutely needs something bastardized.
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