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Alicia's avatar

The thing that really gets me is that I am a confident cook - so I am likely to know when it's the recipe and when it's me having a bad day. People who are new to cooking are likely to blame themsleves instead of a dodgy recipe and that's just not fair.

Many years ago I was helping out on a cookbook shoot - which the author hadn't deigned to attend. We were trying to make one of the dishes to photograph and it just didn't work. I called him and he said "Oh, that one never worked for me either". I never saw the completed book so I don't know if they published it anyway.

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Matt Inwood's avatar

Goodness, I could write far too much on this subject. And I'm sure I've been involved with the publishing of at least one of those mistakes you list above! I was forever drawn into the world of editorial error and away from diligent design. One of the biggest recipe mistakes in my time in publishing was discovered on one of the books that had the highest standards of editing, proofing etc and sold the most: a ratio for a brine that rendered the resulting pork joint utterly inedible. We had a week of replying to so many irate emails and phone calls! And definitely agree that restaurant chefs find the transition to domestic recipe uniquely difficult. Our very best editor would sometimes put in four or five times as much work as an author in order to make the instructions logical and legible (not to mention lyrical). I can think of many books where the editor should really receive a co-author credit (I can think of just as many where the editor would probably want to put a lot of distance between themselves and the book!). Some of the most difficult moments I spent in publishing were fighting an author's case and, contrarily, fighting for more time/resources for an editor to save an author's work.

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