Somewhere on this Internet page there’s a recipe
I’ve got three eggs, half a packet of butter and some apples that need using.
What I’d like is a cake recipe. Nothing particularly ambitious. Something I can put in the oven before the apples grow legs and walk off. I search online and find a promising picture and click.
Apparently, this cake reminds the author of a little cottage in the countryside. That’s lovely, but I’m in the kitchen wondering how much flour I need. The recipe author is now explaining that autumn is her favourite time of year. Mine is rapidly passing while I look for the oven temperature inamongst all the blurb.
I do understand that somebody has put time, effort and money into creating this recipe and I’m grateful they’ve shared it, and I don’t expect them to do all that for nothing. I’m happy for there to be the odd advert, I’d just prefer them not to move or float into the bit I’m reading.
Eventually, I spot “Jump to recipe”.
What a fab idea. We could perhaps have started with that. I press it and arrive at the ingredients, which briefly remain still before an advert loads and shifts everything down. I was looking at 175 grams of something or was that a cup. Bloody hell now I’ve got to convert American cups into grams – where’s the calculator when I need it?
Oh Yay! Another advert. I’m looking at a woman who wants to know whether I’m paying too much for broadband. Almost certainly love, but you’ve caught me at a bad time.
Once I’ve found the flour again, I begin. This is when the practical difficulties of reading a recipe from a phone become apparent. My hands are buttery, the screen keeps going dark and I’m trying to scroll with the only clean bit of my little finger. I wipe my hands, put my glasses back on and try again.
What I miss is being able to put a recipe in front of me and trust it to stay there. A book has its faults, particularly when it insists on closing itself, but a bag of sugar will generally settle that argument.
I don’t mind a story with a recipe, either. If I’m sitting down with a cup of tea, I might enjoy reading about how it came about. When I’ve already greased the tin, I’m rather less interested in the afternoon your aunt first made it.
For now though, I’ve copied the ingredients onto the back of an envelope. The writing gets a bit cramped, but I can read it, and nothing has moved for several minutes. I’ve made cakes before I think to myself. Lets just pop everything into a bowl, give a good mix, pour it in the tin and see what happens.
The apples are finally in a cake and I find myself thinking a recipe book is so much less faff.
