A few years ago, I was looking for an online recipe for stuffed jalapeno poppers to bring to a friend’s Super Bowl party. Because I’d never sliced raw jalapenos before, and because the recipe simply said to slice the jalapenos and scoop out the insides, I didn’t wear gloves while handling the jalapenos, and my hands burned for about an hour afterwards.
With another Google search, I found plenty more horror stories from users who had run into the same problem because they tried an online recipe involving jalapenos, and yes, the recipe skipped the step about putting on kitchen gloves.
Apparently, I got off easy – anyone who did it with a cut on their hand ended up with the cut burning like crazy, and some users said that they had used their finger to adjust a contact lens in their eye before the burning sensation kicked in and they realized what was happening, and they had to go to the emergency room.
So I did another experiment: I googled “jalapeno popper recipes” and looked at the top ten webpages and the top ten YouTube videos that came up, and out of those 20 sources, only ONE of them included the step about putting gloves on to protect your hands. Many of the other recipe pages, in fact, featured colorful food-porn photos of someone slicing and handling the jalapenos with their bare hands. (The burn usually kicks in about a minute after you’re done slicing, so it’s possible that the person in the photos started feeling the painful burn after the photos were done being taken – which means they realized, after the fact, that what they were doing in the photo was dangerous, but they went ahead and put the photos in the recipe anyway.)
A few months ago I re-did the same experiment, and found that this time, the number of top recipes that included the step about putting on gloves had risen from 1 out of 20 to 3 out of 20 – progress, but still with a long way to go.
Many of my friends learned to cook from their parents or their friends, and they’re surprised when I tell them that online directions and recipes from cookbooks so frequently contain huge errors and omissions. It’s not that the recipes fall short because they’re trying to teach something that’s difficult to explain, it’s that they are missing simple steps which could have easily been fixed if someone had given the recipe to a newbie, asked them to follow it, and then listened to their feedback.
The problem, I think, is that it’s notoriously difficult to proofread your own directions (in any subject matter, not just recipes), or to proofread someone else’s directions in a field that you know about. If there’s an error or omission in someone’s directions, but the reader knows what the author was trying to say because the reader is familiar with the subject, the reader’s brain fixes the sentence to mean what they know the author really meant. But then the newbie comes along and tries the same directions, and takes the directions literally. The experienced reader reads “Slice the jalapenos” and their brain fixes it to “Put gloves on and then slice the jalapenos;” the newbie follows the directions literally, and burns their hands.
So, my plea to recipe authors and cookbook publishers: show your recipe to at least one cooking novice, and have them follow it without you hovering over them and giving them any tips about what your directions “really” meant. If they run into problems because of a simple missing step, add the step, and repeat the process until the average newbie can get through the directions with no problem. You would want someone to do this for you, if you were following a set of directions in a field where you were a complete newcomer.
