I understand your perspective. I love cooking as well and I like to tweak recipes and try to never make a dish exactly the same way twice.
There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.
I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.
Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.
There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.
I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.
Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.