PB1A-Recipe

PB 1A

I am familiar with the genre of food recipes. I sometimes enjoy cooking and baking even though I am not very good at it. There are a surplus of various recipes that come from many different cultures and nationalities. In order to find a recipe, I flip through a cookbook or browse the Internet for a website that has a particular dish I am interested in making. There are many websites and books that contain a wide range of recipes such as ones for appetizers, entrées, main courses, breads, jams, and desserts. A few examples would be spinach and artichoke dip, macaroni and cheese, casserole, garlic bread, strawberry jam, and brownies.

For this genre, the audience is anyone who wants to cook, mix together, or bake a particular dish. The purpose of a recipe is for people to follow the written instructions in order to make a desired dish. The context is that the recipes are found in cookbooks and cooking websites and are written for readers to follow the directions they contain. They usually are formatted so that the information is clearly organized for the readers to understand.

Recipes have many conventions such as lists of ingredients and step-by-step directions. If one were to make brownies, one would need a certain amount of eggs, oil, chocolate chips, cocoa powder, and flour. There is also a list of needed sizes for bowls, measuring cups, pans, and spoons to use. The directions are a list of commands that need to be followed to be able to create the right food. A recipe for brownies might instruct one to put the eggs into the ingredients last. There are also preparation instructions, which include what temperature to preheat the oven if using one; this is necessary in order to prevent the food from burning or being undercooked. A recipe typically includes an estimate of how long the food will need to cook and an overall estimate of how long until everything is ready. For brownies, it may take thirty-five minutes for one particular recipe to bake or it may only need twenty minutes. Somewhere on the recipe page there may be an approximation of how many the recipe serves; a pan of brownies might serve only a dozen people. Usually there is a nutrition label specifying how much protein, calories, sugar, sodium, cholesterol, trans fat, saturated fat, and total fat are in a serving size. All recipes should have the title of the dish near the top of the page and sometimes even a picture of the dish. An online site may include short paragraphs of reviews from those who have tried following the recipe. People have the opportunity to rate recipes with using stars. If one felt that the recipe was well written with specific directions, one could give it five stars.

Overall, food recipes are a type of genre that are easy to identify. Although there are recipes for many different types of food, such as cakes and tamales, they all have similar conventions and are written for the use of anyone who would like to attempt to make the dish.