[jeffburka]

I think the recipe was copy/pasted from a transcription project, possibly this one: http://transcribe.folger.edu/

The zero width characters might be leftovers from the transcription process, marking disagreements or known spelling errors or something.

If you click into one of the books on that website, you can see options to mark stuff as "ex" or "unc", which explains the weird markup (<span class="ex">er</span>).