Teach single techniques

Philipp Deus

1. Failure & recovery
2. Specific techniques ←
3. Substitutions
4. Roles
5. Small tasks

This instalment of Cookbooks Don’t Teach You to Cook considers another aspect of learning to cook that you rarely find in cookbooks and, by extension, technical documentation in general. The cookbooks as technical writing cliché works because everyone eats and uses a computer, and some of you also cook and build products.

Mussels

In series 3, episode 3, (March 2006) of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay decides to make a point about technique. He reacts to the chef not knowing how to cook mussels:

In what British people recognise as banter, and not an actual argument, Ramsay shows (mock) disbelief and frustration because he wishes that he could assume the basic skills that professionals learn at catering college. If you didn’t go to catering college yourself, I’d guess that no-one has ever shown you how to cook mussels, and that you’ve never tried by yourself.

Ingredient-specific techniques

When you cook with white wine, it doesn’t require any particular technique; you just add the right amount at the right time. But with mussels, as with many raw ingredients, you need to know two things.

1. You have to prepare them properly before cooking.
2. You can choose between different cooking techniques – you don’t necessarily have to steam them.

You won’t find any of these steps difficult, but you wouldn’t easily guess them either. Fortunately, you can find this kind of content online more easily than in recipe books:

1. wikiHow articles like ‘how to cook mussels’ address exactly this kind of problem, as part of its mission to teach you how to do anything
2. YouTube videos like ‘How to cook mussels’ (Sainsbury’s Food) show you a basic technique, without making it part of a recipe.

These cooking tutorials differ from recipes in an important way: they explain the technique. For example, the wikiHow article and the Sainsbury’s Food video explain why you remove the mussel’s ‘beard’, and discard mussels that don’t have a tightly-closed shell, possibly after sharply tapping the shell.

These do’s and don’ts apply to every mussels recipe. This makes them separate from recipes, just like troubleshooting tips.

Cookbooks

Cookbooks don’t teach you how to cook when they describe a happy path, but not troubleshooting failure. Before you can use a conventional cookbook, you need to learn basic techniques, such as how to set up your working environment and prepare ingredients.

In terms of documentation types, the typical cookbook recipe includes reference documentation (ingredients), and a half-hearted how-to guide (method). Unfortunately, cookbooks rarely include tutorial content, such as how to cook a mussel.

Documentation & design

User manuals often fail to acknowledge the need to master basic techniques before following their how-to guides. And while software product teams don’t want responsibility for teaching their customers to use a computer, for example, their ideal customer might need some level of help and explanations.

This tension extends to software design, sometimes as a trade-off between adopting a standard design that everyone knows how to use, and a high-quality (by some measure) design that requires preparation. The right choice depends on your context. Sometimes you should avoid the need to know how to prepare mussels, and instead use frozen mussels.