Cooking instructions are written as prose, which reads well in an armchair and badly at the stove, with your hands occupied and several things happening at once. You lose your place, and the structure of what you are doing is buried in sentences.
Visual Recipes, codenamed ICONIFY, asked what a recipe should look like if using it came first. I led it in the Knight Lab Studio in fall 2019. The idea was to take the narration out: ingredients as an icon list, color-coded by their role in the dish; prep separated from cooking, with the mise en place shown between them; and the method drawn as icons wherever it could be. Two questions stayed open: what cannot be iconified, and how much of the reduction the natural language tools of the day could do on their own.
The worked examples are in the project's examples document: two roast chickens, Jamie Oliver's and Mark Bittman's, taken from their source prose to an iconic summary.
