I’m in a conference for most of the day today, so my partner is going to pick out a recipe that she believes I can cook when I come back at 6pm and shop for it. So we’ll see how that goes.
It’s one of the things that’s most difficult about cookbooks as a genre, I think. Many recipes include an estimate of the time they take, but at least some times that’s wrong—a lot of cookbook authors concentrate on the time from the start of a cooking process to service and leave out prep time, which can vary depending on how comfortable a cook is with whatever chopping, measuring, etc. is required.
I’m most often bitten in using cookbooks by missing that something needed to marinate for a considerable time prior to cooking. I don’t get hit by that often any longer because I usually get a sense from the type of dish whether it’s marinated or has some other long prior preparation needed (e.g., I know now if I’m working with a brisket that it’s going to take a long time one way or the other without having to see that in the recipe) but every once in a while I still do get caught unawares.
It’s also hard sometimes from a recipe to tell whether a prep is a serious pain in the ass in some non-obvious way—there’s some fussy sequencing, or there’s a step that can go wrong if you’re not attentive; there’s two or three things that need to be going at the same time, that sort of thing. As a genre, cookbooks have a surprising amount of variability in whether the author accurately imagines and narrates what it is going to be like to cook a given dish—at least some of the time, that might be because the chef knows the dish so well that they almost can’t figure out how to translate it into a recipe. (I suspect also at times it’s because the author is trying to disguise a recipe that they lifted from someone else so they introduce unnecessary steps or processes.)
Image credit: "Mystery Meat #3 - DSC02527_ep" by Eric.Parker is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0.