Cookbook editing requires a special recipe, a
combination of patience, vocabulary, and the ability to deal with ever-mounting
hunger.
I've had the pleasure recently of copyediting
several cookbooks for a friend, and I was surprised at the number of terms and
special copyediting issues I had to stop and consider.
I've edited a wide range of materials over the
years and I figured cookbooks would be, well, a piece of cake. But it turns out
there's more to cooking than "Microwave on high for twenty minutes."
You see, I'm one of those people who doesn't read instructions before doing
things (even microwaving frozen dinners), a fact my wife and son will attest to
when it comes to my cooking.
To begin with, cooks have a language of their own—vocabulary
you don't come across on a daily basis. Words like dollop, for instance.
I considered myself clever when I learned to slit the plastic before microwaving a
frozen pasta dish; and so I am fully unprepared to "garnish with a
dollop of sour cream."
And in a cookbook you have to spell the
ingredients and cooking terms correctly, and that's a more labor-intensive than
editing, say, explanations of high-performance computing.
I did grow up in a pre-microwave world around
things like colanders and ladles, but we didn't have to spell them. And
over the years since I haven't either.
And then there are caps, a problem you get into
with any text on wine or cheeses, since many varieties are named after regions
in France or Greece or Italy
And in a wider cookbook a whole lot of
ingredients might need capping, and to me getting that right is as important as
using elegant photos in the book. And is it chick
peas or chickpeas, and a lot of
questions like that.
And style issues quickly begin to heat up, as well.
Cookbooks are often full of abbreviations, which might come with or without
periods. They have numbers, many used for measurements, others used in quotes,
and the clean, simple rules laid down in AP for numerals versus spelling out
numbers just don't cut the mustard.
That's when it's time to pull out a deeper style
guide and some other cookbooks for wisdom.
Grammar issues arise too. For brevity in their
instructions, cookbooks tend to omit the subject and/or object of sentences,
leading to possible danglers along the lines of "stir until frothy"
(I picture chefs with rabies) or "chill until cool," which sounds
like a cold euphemism for "calm the heck down!"
But these are fun challenges, easily met by
pulling out a few style guides and cookbooks for reference—and making (and
following) a style sheet, all of which can be enforced with thoughtful use of
Find, and Find and Replace. And also lunch breaks that may require running to
the supermarket to pick up some tasty-sounding ingredient you've never heard
of.
But copyediting is easy. The hard task is
checking the content, including measurements, cooking times, etc., and as I
said, I don't garnish with dollops. So the cook/writer is left with the most-formidable
of editing tasks.
What I also learned is how creative people get in
the kitchen, mixing ingredients and flavors.
One I just proofread is a cookbook devoted solely
to pumpkin recipes—timed, appropriately, for the fall season with the approach
of Halloween and Thanksgiving. It's a whole book of pumpkin recipes and not a
single one read "Microwave on high for seven minutes . . ."
And in proving there's more to Jack-O'-Lanterns
(spelling according to Merriam-Webster's) than just pumpkin pie, the book shows
how to use pumpkins for everything from dessert to snacks to something you bake
a meatloaf in.
A quick plug for the book: It is Easy Pumpkin Recipes: There's More to Pumpkin than Pumpkin Pie! by Nicole L'Esperance
and her mother, Marie L'Esperance.
As with the other books in their Easy Recipes from Scratch series, they have complied a collection of family and modern recipes
to prove that cooking from scratch can be easy and is even possible on busy
weeknights—and even without a microwave.
—John Sailors
(C) 2012, by Story Crest Press.
Story Crest
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