[santraginean]

With recipes, I suspect it depends on how the recipe is written. Usually they're quite prose-heavy, and require a lot of linguistic parsing before you start to get the meaning out of them.

It's interesting to think about, and makes me suspect that this is why I tend to prefer writing my own recipes out as tersely as possible, particularly if I know the general procedure. At this point I don't need to be told to preheat an oven or to scrape down the sides of the stand mixer, so I'll just write down things like "Creaming method, 350° in 8x8 cake pan." I might even start writing them in pseudocode now.

My partner takes it a step further with her cranberry sauce recipe; the instructions just say "C'mon."