A HARTE APPETITE: CATSUP OR KETCHUP?

The Queen of Sheba chocolate cake is everything a recipe should be. It is so rich and decadent that you want top bake one immediately.

Some years ago a lady wrote to the London Daily Telegraph and reported, "The hymn 'Onward Christian Soldiers' sung to the right tune and in a not too brisk tempo makes a very good egg timer. If you put the egg into boiling water and sing all five verses and chorus, the egg will be just right when you come to 'Amen.'"

This may well be the most unconventional recipe I've ever run across, and it underscores the fact that while a recipe is essentially "a formula or written set of instructions for preparing food," to quote Joan Whitman and Dolores Simon, authors of a handbook for cookbook writers, some ways of writing those instructions are better than others.

The matter of writing style, I've discovered, is no less important in recipes than in any other form of prose. And it may be even more perplexing when it comes to recipes. Where else, for example, do the words sit and stand mean the same thing? (Thus, "add yeast to warm water and let sit five minutes" and "add yeast to warm water and let stand five minutes" are interchangeable.) No wonder cookbook author Carol Field suggests writers need guidance through what she calls "the dense and intricate thicket of writing recipes and cooking instructions."

Believe it or not, recipe writers and cookbook authors occasionally get into spirited arguments over questions of style and grammar. For example, as Whitman and Simon note, "Capitalization, a seemingly noncontroversial issue in the population at large, can cause heated debate in food-writing circles." So too, apparently, can the matter of the serial comma, how to best indicate the measurement of butter or margarine and the question of whether to use "of" after words like "dash" or "pinch." (Whitman and Simon say yes, but Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane L. Baker, authors of the "Recipe Writer's Handbook," say no.) A dash, by the way, is anything less than 1/8 teaspoon.

Food writers have developed a smorgasbord of technical rules governing the language of recipes. Among other things, they decree that the correct term for an angel food cake pan is "tube pan"; that bread crumbs are not one word; that ketchup is the preferred spelling for catsup; that soft cheeses are "shredded" while hard cheeses are "grated"; that chocolate chips are properly referred to as chocolate morsels; that there is no generic name for Tabasco sauce; that decimal points should never be used in recipe writing; and that when a wine is named after a grape it should not be capitalized unless the grape is named after a place and the wine comes from there.

The language of recipes is worth such fussing over. That's because recipes are practically indispensable tools for just about anyone who likes to cook. It's true, of course, that some cooks are more dependent on recipes than others and that two different cooks can take the same recipe and produce two different results. Pie crust is a perfect example of that principle. But just because recipes can never fully account for the level of skill of the cooks who use them or record every subtle nuance of a dish's preparation does not mean they are unworthy of careful crafting. After all, the same thing is true of a musical composition. As the great British food writer Elizabeth David put it, "One certainly cannot learn the technical details of cookery entirely from books, but if the cooks of the past had believed that written recipes were unnecessary, we should now be in a sad plight indeed."

So recipes are vital documents and as such they need to communicate clearly and accurately. As the dust jacket on the "Recipe Writer's Handbook" admonishes, "Every recipe ... has the power to make or break a meal and a cook's reputation!" And this is especially true today when, according to Ostmann and Baker, "an overwhelming number of today's recipe users are cooking illiterates; that is, they haven't learned to cook alongside their mothers or grandmothers, and they lack knowledge of what many food professionals consider basic food terminology and skills." As proof they cite a recent national poll in which fully three-fourths of the people surveyed, almost all of whom considered themselves excellent cooks, failed a basic cooking quiz. They didn't know how many ounces were in a cup, how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon or the standard measure of a stick of butter.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that over the years various food writers have received some rather astonishing calls from their readers. For instance, Ostmann and Baker tell of one caller who wanted to know how far to drop drop cookies. They cite another who had just bought a new oven and wondered whether it was preheated. And they report that still another couldn't understand why a cake recipe produced such a gritty result. Amazingly, it turned out that the caller had used shells and all as the recipe had specified whole eggs!

But even if we weren't dependent on them for instruction, recipes would still deserve to be written with a careful editorial eye. For, after all, a recipe is more than just a blueprint. It's a creative undertaking. And though the primary focus of any recipe is, admittedly, physical sustenance, like other forms of creative writing, it has the potential to nourish the soul as well.

And who's to say a recipe is any less noble a form of self-expression than other works of art? Indeed, I'd argue it's the ultimate way to give of yourself. (I guess that's why I have little use for people who refuse to share their recipes and downright disdain for those who leave out vital ingredients when they do.) As a matter of fact, sharing recipes is a uniquely American tradition, for printed cookbooks were almost unknown in this country during the first 150 years of our colonial history. Rather, housewives relied on their own trusted collections of handwritten "receipts" which they handed down from generation to generation. Thus, no less than other artistic works, recipes are a means of achieving some measure of immortality. As the main character in the wonderful Mexican novel "Like Water for Chocolate" says, "Great aunt Tita lives so long as someone cooks her recipes."

So while I wouldn't claim that recipes are in the same league as the Great Books, I would maintain that they are certainly a respectable literary genre, which raises the question, what makes a recipe well written? Ostmann and Baker devote a whole section of their book to this question, what they call recipe philosophy, and they quote numerous food authorities on the subject. For example, Jennifer Darling, a food editor for Meredith Books, says, "The basic ingredient of every good recipe is clear, concise directions." She's right. As Whitman and Simon point out, "A recipe must meet the same standards of English as any other piece of explanatory prose...."

But beyond that, Carol Haddix, food editor of the Chicago Tribune, observes, "Any recipe that makes someone want to cook is good. The rest is just details." Cookbook author Greg Patent agrees. He declares, "Reading a good recipe makes me want to head straight for the kitchen and start cooking."

Not every recipe, of course, can live up to that standard, but, as the novelist Joseph Conrad noted, they nevertheless constitute a unique form of communication. He called them "the only product of the human mind altogether above suspicion." As he pointed out, "The intention of every other piece of prose may be discussed and even mistrusted; but the purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable. Its object can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind."

Queen of Sheba Cake

If the fundamental test of a good recipe is that it makes you want to prepare it, this one passes with flying colors. Within minutes of watching Julia Child prepare this dessert on the 100th episode of her pioneering television show, "The French Chef," I was in the kitchen trying my hand at it. That was many years ago, and I've made it many times since. Like most French cakes, it is only a single layer, but it is as decadent as any two-layer cake you'll ever eat.

Ingredients:

2/3 cup plus 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate morsels

1 tablespoon instant coffee

2 tablespoons boiling water

1 stick plus 6 tablespoons soft butter

2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

3 eggs, separated

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

pinch of salt

1/3 cup pulverized blanched almonds

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

3/4 cup cake flour

1 and 1/2 tablespoons dark rum

Directions:

Dissolve instant coffee in boiling water and add 2/3 cup chocolate morsels. Stir over very low heat or microwave until chocolate is melted. Cream 1 stick butter and 2/3 cup sugar until soft and fluffy. Beat in egg yolks. Whip egg whites with cream of tartar and salt at low speed. When they begin to foam, gradually add 2 tablespoons sugar and beat at high speed until whites hold their shape but are still smooth and shiny. Stir chocolate into butter mixture and add almonds, extract, and flour, stirring well. Stir in one fourth of egg whites to lighten batter and then carefully and rapidly fold in remaining whites. Turn batter into a round 8-inch greased and floured cake pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes until cake is puffed on top and tests clean around circumference. The center should not test clean and may move slightly when shaken. Cool 10 minutes, run a knife around edge of pan, and unmold cake. Let cool completely.

Melt remaining 1/2 cup chocolate morsels in the rum and beat in 6 tablespoons butter one tablespoon at a time until icing is smooth and of spreading consistency, beating over cold water if necessary. Pour icing over cake to cover top and sides and decorate with whole almonds. Makes 6-8 servings.

Listen to A Harte Appetite every Saturday at 11:59 a.m. following "Whad'ya Know" on KRCU, 90.9 on your FM dial. Send suggestions for this column to A Harte Appetite, c/o The Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@semovm.semo.edu.