Imagine: You are a Bon Appétit recipe. You sprang from the fecund brain and dextrous hands of one of our test-kitchen folks (or a Hot 10 chef). You've been tested, tasted, and cross-tested (and cross-tested and cross-tested). You've been read and approved by our food editor, Carla Lalli Music. You've been run through the ringer of our rigorous recipe development process, and now you're finally ready for the pages of Bon Appétit, right?
Wrong! Oh, recipe, there's so much to be done to fix you up before you're shipped around to millions of readers, and read by millions more online. You've got to be edited, my little friend.
Liesel Davis is the person who edits all of our recipes before they make their debut. It's one of the most important parts of a recipe's long journey into our magazine: she's the keeper of all style guides, styler of ingredient lists, a veritable human cooking-term thesaurus. And it took her some work to get here: Before Davis started at Bon Appétit, she received a master's degree in food studies from NYU, went to culinary school, and even worked at a kitchen store in a small college town, where she said she "learned what kind of questions people have about cooking and kitchen tools." And she uses all that knowledge to bring our readers better, clearer recipes. Here's how that works:
1. It's Got to Be a Good Egg
What constitutes a good recipe? A good recipe has a complete ingredient list, is ordered correctly, and contains clear instructions—all written according to our style guide. "We're providing a service," says Davis. "A recipe is a roadmap that you want someone to be able to follow to get to a desired endpoint." With recipes, accuracy is key—but that doesn't stop Davis from trying to make a recipe more joyful and engaging. "Upon that utilitarian bone structure, you can drape descriptive language," she says. "Whether it’s a weeknight meal or a dinner party, a recipe should help someone succeed in the kitchen and have fun while doing it." In any given month, Davis will edit between 60 and 100 recipes.
First, Davis starts with the formatting. Formatting is dealing with what the text looks like: Bolding things that need bolding, such as "Do ahead" callouts; getting the text laid out correctly; making sure each section in a recipe (like ingredient groups, ingredient info, and instruction groups) is properly labeled; checking that all parts of the recipe—from serving size to the hednote (the little blurb that introduces the recipe)—exist where they should exist.
"It's about remembering all the nitty-gritty visual details," says Davis. But once that's done, the process starts to get cooler.
2. These Pics Don't Lie
Whenever she edits a recipe, Davis pulls up the photo of the dish that will run in the magazine—she wants to make sure the recipe she's editing will come out the same way it appears on the page. If, for some reason, the photo doesn't match the recipe, the team gets creative. "Stylists love to use flaky sea salt in their images. And I get it! It makes the dish look more beautiful," says Davis. "So if that happens, we'll usually just include flaky sea salt as a garnish. Because what doesn't benefit from a little sea salt?" Truth.
The same goes for garnishes: If the parsley in a recipe gets folded in, but a stylist sprinkles some of the chopped herb on top for the photo, no big deal. Small tweaks (all approved by the test kitchen) allow readers to create a dish that's as close as possible to the one they were promised in the magazine's photo.
With the photo pulled up on her computer screen, Davis will go through the recipe, making sure the directions read fluidly and ultimately make use of every ingredient, and that everything makes sense (which makes sense, right?). For example, she'll double-check that it's appropriate to call for a large bowl rather than a medium bowl (Davis judges those sizes based on a three-piece bowl set), and that the minuscule amount of orange-flower water does eventually get added. If she has questions, Davis inputs them right into the recipe's text. Then she'll sit down with the test kitchen to go over the recipe, asking questions and making sure that her changes don't affect the outcome of the recipe.
3. House of Style
When we write our ingredient lists and directions, we assume our readers are adventurous cooks: They'd probably want to learn how to make pie dough from scratch or braise some lamb shanks, but they may not know the difference between choux and puff pastry, or the steps of making demi-glace. With this assumption in mind, we've created style guides that regulate our language and word choice in our recipes. Davis maintains these guides, which cover everything from ingredient lists to ingredients information blurbs to our "Do Ahead" specifications.
The language we use in a recipe can affect how a dish turns out, so employing precise language allows us to give the reader context and cues for cooking it correctly. This is why it's important that we have a central style guide that specifies precisely how we write—and why. Take a vanilla bean, for example. As a cook, you probably know what a vanilla bean is. You might also know that the most common way to use it is to split it and scrape out its seeds. But... maybe you don't!
"Another publication may call for 'vanilla bean, scraped' in their ingredient list, and just assume you’ll split it," explains Davis. If a recipe calls for a vanilla bean, we write "vanilla bean, split lengthwise," and instruct you to scrape it in the recipe's instructions.
We designate the spelling of words that have multiple variations, too. To us, chili is the dish; chile is the hot pepper. It's important to make these distinctions so that each ingredient fits our style and doesn't confuse the reader. Similarly, we have style guidelines for the verbs we use. For instance, the only times we ever say flip are if we're making pancakes or cooking hamburger patties. Otherwise, it's turn. "If you're cooking a steak, chances are you're using tongs," says Davis, "and that's more of a turning motion than an active flipping motion." Davis also tries to use words that give the reader certain cues. "When we say 'whisk,' we're cueing someone to use a whisk and describing a specific action," Davis says. "Whisking and stirring and folding are all very different actions." (Stirring is when you're combining a liquid, folding is when you're trying to delicately incorporate something, like egg whites into a batter or meringue.) So are tossing (for chunkier, dry stuff) and mixing (for something that's not all liquid).
"A word like combine doesn't imply any technique, so it's the most basic," she explains. "We try to use that the least. It just means that you are getting all the ingredients together."
Davis also adds extra ingredient information to the recipe if we call for something that isn't too common, like shichimi togarashi (it can be found at Japanese markets and in the Asian foods section of some supermarkets) or lime pickle (also found at Asian markets or online). As an ingredient gets more popular, however, those explanations tend to disappear. "Ten years ago, tahini would have been on our ingredient info list," explains Davis. "Now, most of our readers know what tahini is, and it’s super easy to find. Often, if an ingredient starts popping up in a lot of restaurants, people begin to recognize and cook with it."
4. Order Up!
Next, Davis looks at the ingredient list, confirming that everything is in the correct order—i.e., listed in the order they actually appear in the directions. "We want to think about how somebody is going to shop for and prep their food, then guide them through the list in the most logical way possible," explains Davis. For groups of ingredients that are added all at once, we order them by prioritizing whole ingredients—like the apples in this apple pie—then those listed by volume.
"In terms of citrus, we always call for the zest before the juice, because you want to zest your citrus before you juice it," says Davis, further highlighting her attention to ingredient utility. (Fun fact: Water is not included in our ingredient lists, since it's a resource that's presumably always available. If you don't have ready access to water, you might not want to be cooking at all.)
After that, the recipe goes through a circuit of hands: Our food editor, Carla Lalli Music (who makes sure Davis's changes are still in line with the original tested-and-approved recipe), our research department (which makes sure things like ingredient buying info and brand callouts in our recipes are factually correct), our copy department (which makes sure our recipes are grammatically correct), and then back to Davis to make all the changes and—finally—to fit the recipe into its spot on the page.
5. Time For a Trim
Perhaps the toughest part of Davis's job is the last step in editing a recipe: Copy fitting, or making the recipe actually fit into the space it's allotted on the page. (Not a problem for web-exclusive recipes!)
That can present a problem with some recipes, especially those that need to be painstakingly explained. Take the Kouign-Amann, the decadent French pastry from our April 2014 issue. "Baking like that is super technical and something that most people aren’t familiar with," Davis says, "so communicating clear instructions to someone with no reference is trickier than explaining to someone how to make soup."
A recipe like that needs a lot of explanation, but it still needs to fit into the magazine's layout. Working with assistant food editor Claire Saffitz, Davis made sure every word counted: "It was mostly about making the precise directions read clearly and smoothly in as few words as possible." As a further collaborative effort, Davis worked with junior designer Alaina Sullivan to figure out which parts of the layout could be tweaked—or sacrificed—for more space to get more text on the page. "Getting it to where it ended up without losing any integrity or clarity was definitely a group effort on our food team’s and art department’s part. Even with a super involved recipe, it's really fun to edit when there's a collaborative spirit." Ultimately, the recipe earned rave reviews in our comments. Davis had done her job.
The flip side? Having a little space to play around with. A great example can be found in our November 2013 issue: the butter-roasted turkey breasts. Normally, poultry is cooked to 165 degrees, but this recipe tells readers to remove the breasts from the oven at 160 degrees. Why? "For optimal moistness," Davis wrote, "you will want to cook the white meat of the turkey breasts to a lower temperature than you would if cooking the dark meat." The recipe doesn't technically need that little explanation, but its presence benefits the reader. "Explaining why you're doing what you're doing instead of only how makes people better cooks," says Davis.
But having extra room is usually not the case. Space, Davis laments, is often the killer of good, descriptive, educational language. "But having to cut makes it better: You can say the same thing with tighter, more concise language." It proves that in almost every form of writing, one must kill one's darlings. Only here, we get to eat them, too.