This got me to thinking how chefs come up with recipes. What makes one recipe for tomato soup different to another recipe for tomato soup? Why did they make that change? Is it based on something they read elsewhere, or is it just from experience? Partly it comes down to chemistry (kneading to form gluten strands, or using baking soda to produce CO2), but I’m sure there must be some happy accidents or successful tests that lead to alterations.

So, I wanted to compare some recipes. I started with brownies, as these have a very simple recipe, but also a combination of different ingredients, processes, and subjective measurements. And then I shifted to some pseudocode:


ingredients:
200g of 70% dark chocolate
250g of unsalted butter
360g of caster sugar
4 eggs
65g of plain flour
80g of cocoa powder
1tsp of baking powder

X = recipe:
O = preheat(oven, 180C)
G = line(tin, greaseproof paper)
A = wmelt([chocolate, butter])
B = stir([cocoa powder, flour, baking powder, caster sugar])
C = stir([A, B))
D = beat(eggs)
E = stir([C, D]) until silky
F = fill(G, E)
bake(O, F, 25)

This brought to light a few interesting questions:

• What happens to the variables? Once stir([A, B]) has been performed, A and B no longer exist in that form. Any reference to them should probably fail. If we had B=100g of A then A would then weigh 100g less – or would another variable be created implicitly?
• Which steps can be optimized? If we’d had B = stir([cocoa powder, flour]) and B2 = stir([B, baking powder, caster sugar]), how would we know that the two can be combined?
• Is it possible to tell when operations can be handled concurrently? If there were two cooks in the kitchen, one could have handled the creation of A, and the other the creation of B. But what if creating A somehow impacted the creation of B?

The next step is to make a parser for the above, possibly with some minor changes to address the questions, but I’m keen to keep any recipe language flexible enough to keep the ‘sensual’ aspects, even if it means that it cannot be run by a machine. For me the interest lies in comparing recipes, seeing where processes are equivalent, or taking aspects from one recipe and applying them to another. Watch this space!

• March 11th: Hypnagogic sleep. Defined as the experiences you get when falling asleep, there are a couple of techniques to experiment with this outside of regular sleeping. This ebook suggests these two approaches, which I’ll try in order (the first for a couple of days, then the second):

The Arm Approach

• Lie on your back in bed or sit in a comfortable armchair.
• Rest your elbow on the surface of the bed or the arm of the chair so that your forearm is pointing straight up. Let your wrist go limp if that is more comfortable for you.
• Focus your mind on a problem you wish to solve.
• Allow yourself to drift toward sleep, while continuing to focus on the problem as long as you can.
• Wait for your arm to relax and fall, waking you up. This will happen naturally when you begin to fall more deeply asleep.
• Record any creative thoughts you had while dozing.
• Repeat.

The Spoon Approach

Dali was famous for his spoon method. He rested his chin on a spoon held up by his hands. As Dali drifted off, his muscles would relax and the spoon would fall on the table and wake him up from a hypnagogic dream. He then proceeded to paint what he saw.

• March 19th: Lucid dreaming. There’s a handy guide to this which looks intriguingly doable. Plus it ties in to the previous step (the ‘recording’ stage) quite neatly!
• March 26th: Waking. I’m going to get one of these for this (and hopefully for future, given its price/good reviews/geekery!). It’s designed to wake you at your optimal ‘almost awake’ moment which is near when you want to wake up, through some cunning use of movement sensors (I believe), and it even keeps sleep data which you can download via USB. I’m also going to try replacing my traditional beepy alarm clock with various music genres to see which work well, and which don’t.

Other things: I’ve (finally) put a section of my table aside as a ‘breakfast space’ (I’m incredibly bad at having breakfast) to see if having everything ready and waiting makes me more likely to actually have it!