A Recipe

Often, an old book, where recipes were written down, or another person who still holds a recipe in their head, is the best source for a recipe. The Raymond Chandler Omnibus, blue cloth hardback, 1944, too mildewed to keep. A person with a recipe could be anyone. What they look like won’t show if they have a recipe or not. People can surprise you with a recipe. The push-in power button of the second-hand silver amplifier and turntable that, pushed in, lit the left/right dials where the needles danced up into the red as they registered the whump of the speakers’ turning on. There are certain to be ingredients required for the recipe that you won’t have, but worry about that later, when you’ve found a book of recipes or a person with a recipe. Often the ingredients that go into a recipe stain the pages of the book where that recipe is written down. A person isn’t stained this way, quite. The chicken pieces on the campfire, rain sizzling on the fire, sizzling on the blackened chicken, pattering on the tent. It’s best to avoid a recipe, the ingredients for which you have no taste for or suspect you’ll strongly dislike: just because it’s you following the recipe won’t fundamentally change the ingredients, however much you wish they could be changed. A recipe does not always require the application of heat. Weightlessness and timelessness. A recipe can require or ask for something. A person who holds a recipe can too. Time is an ingredient. She wanted Marmite for breakfast. Rex, the Border collie, snapped at her hand. A stain in a book where a recipe is written is proof, though proof of what? It’s best to do what the recipe asks you to do, even if the recipe hasn’t required you to do it. Following a recipe sometimes asks that you do nothing, usually for a period of time that will be specified in the recipe. If you follow a very old recipe, you won’t travel into the past, quite. Some ingredients it’s no longer advisable, pleasant or legal to source and/or use in a recipe. A recipe is a story about measuring and weighing, chopping and crushing, heat and cold. Do you know what you want to make? That can’t be helped. Like any story, a recipe has an ending that shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.

^{Footnote: this poem was created using the Dietary restrictions constraint as the starting point.}