Fold in the Cheese

The (in)accessibility of modern recipes and how we can reinvent them

Who are recipes really designed for? In this essay for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, Alexandra Badescu explores the communication of cooking instructions and the hidden assumptions embedded within them.

By Alexandra Badescu

There is a scene in the TV series Schitt’s Creek that I often return to. In this particular episode of the sitcom about a lovable-but-out-of-touch, formerly wealthy family, mother Moira Rose — in an attempt to prove she has cooked before — is instructing her son David in making enchiladas:

Moira: “The next step is to fold in the cheese.”

David: “What does that mean? What does “fold in the cheese” mean?”

Moira: “You fold it in.”

David: “I understand that, but how? How do you fold it? Do you fold it in half, like a piece of paper, and drop it in the pot, or what do you do?”

The scene ends with David storming off in frustration and Moira, clearly clueless, calling out to him to ask, “What does ‘burning’ smell like?”

As viewers, we chuckle at how the most basic of cooking skills appear alien to the characters. But this scene lingers in my mind because it captures a feeling many of us are familiar with: staring at a recipe and realizing it’s speaking a language we don’t quite understand.

“Whip until soft peaks form.”

“Fry until golden.”

“Season to taste.”

These are commonplace phrases in the English cooking lexicon. They have also, at one point, been completely baffling to someone.

I grew up with a fascination and reverence for recipe books. I’d spend hours flipping through them, tracing each step in my head, trying to understand how a dish came together. Recipes felt scientific and alchemical in equal measure: follow these instructions exactly and you will create magic. I took on the mantle of “chef” in my family from a young age, and it stayed with me.

But my siblings took a different journey. My sister, who is dyslexic, found many recipes frustrating and often unusable. This was always curious to me, as this didn’t reflect on her cooking skills. In fact, it was quite the opposite — my sister is a good cook. She rotates through a small but solid set of dishes (a curry-esque meal with a bit of every sauce and spice in the kitchen; stir-fry noodles, also with a bit of every sauce and spice in the kitchen; hearty salads; steamed veg aplenty), and at least somewhat enjoys cooking this way.

But when pushed to tackle a recipe, her experience is different. The first time her partner visited our house, she took it upon herself to cook two dishes from the oxymoronic cookbook Ottolenghi Simple. As an observer, you’d be hard-pressed to say she relished the process. I wondered what made following an Ottolenghi challenging-in-a-fun-way for some, but an experience-to-recover-from for others.

This also raised another question: who are recipes actually designed for?

Contemporary recipes are shaped into a standard template. A list of ingredients. A sequence of steps. Follow them, and you will arrive at the intended destination. But recipes are not neutral. They are designed —and their design assumes a particular kind of reader, learner, and body.

Many recipes imagine a reader who can comfortably process dense text, jumping between ingredients and instructions, as well as technical and vague sensory cues. They might tell you to remove something from the heat when it’s “perfectly caramelized”, or, like in Schitt’s Creek, ask you to “fold” in grated cheese.

Before recipes were written down, cooking knowledge was largely embodied. You learnt recipes through observation and participation. The earliest written recipes, found on Babylonian cuneiform tablets, show how much knowledge was assumed in their sparse instructions: a translated recipe for a beetroot stew includes steps like “leg meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You sear. You fold in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro...”

It’s not clear who the intended reader was, but I wonder if a Babylonian cook ever scratched their head wondering, “how to fold in salt?” As literacy rates and printing capabilities grew, so did the spread of cookbooks, although instructions remained vague and measurements were loose.¹

In today’s world, where kitchens, equipment and ingredients are far more standardized and homogenized, apparently imprecise instructions seem like a flaw. Modern recipes strive for reproducibility through exact timings, specific temperatures (thanks to thermostat-controlled ovens), and step-by-step instructions. Many assume a level of textual fluency and the ability to interpret and act out “cook speak”, as well as a cook who is full of energy, able to stand at a kitchen counter for long periods of time and move quickly around a kitchen.

I saw the limitations of this approach when I worked as a baker in a residential care community in South East England, where I ran workshops for adults with learning disabilities. People would get stuck because the instructions didn’t meet them where they were. A step might contain too many actions at once, or a phrase might be too abstract. In response, we found ways to adapt recipes by breaking steps down further and introducing visual cues such as Makaton, a communication system that uses signs and symbols.²

Preparing and Cooking Cakes, Tomb of Rekhmire, by Nina de Garis Davies (MET). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This type of disability-centred recipe design is gaining traction: in the UK, Tesco, a major supermarket chain, recently launched a campaign called Now We’re Cooking to highlight the inaccessibility of many digital recipes, particularly for anyone relying on assistive technologies such as e-readers. It also adapted a selection of its online recipes, making them available in e-reader, braille, and audio formats, while adding British Sign Language and closed captions to some of its video recipes.

These are welcome innovations, but of course, creating a dish requires more than simply processing a recipe. In Crip Up the Kitchen, a cookbook for disabled and neurodivergent cooks, Jules Sherred positions accessibility as a key part of the cooking process itself. In addition to communicating instructions in small, explicit steps, recipes account for levels of energy, pain, focus, and mobility — letting readers judge whether something is manageable before they begin. Most dishes use pressure cookers, air fryers, or bread machines to simplify and reduce labour. Through this care and consideration, Sherred shows how accessibility can function as a design principle and widens the scope of the imagined audience for recipes.

In this way, creating or adapting recipes with inclusivity in mind adds another layer to the cooking process. It emphasizes how a dish can realistically — rather than just ideally — be made.

Disability-centred recipe design also raises questions about mediums used to communicate information. These days, recipes aren’t only bound to printed text. From the classic TV cooking shows to short-form TikToks, recipes are increasingly presented through audiovisual media. These formats can communicate forms of culinary knowledge that written recipes struggle to capture: video allows cooks to experience ASMR-like sounds of onions softening in a pan, or to witness what “folding in cheese” looks like in practice. While the criticisms of social media cooking are many (and some are highly valid, particularly when aesthetics and entertainment are prioritized over creating reproducible recipes), it can also offer sensory and embodied cues that make recipes legible to a wider range of people.

So the next time you flip through a recipe book — or jump to criticize a short-form cooking video — consider who the recipe is for. Recipes are often treated as neutral, universal instructions, but they quietly assume a specific kind of reader, someone who can decode their language, structure and pace. Once that assumption becomes visible, recipes begin to look more like the designed systems they are, shaped by particular ideas of reading, learning, and ability.

With this in mind, David Rose from Schitt’s Creek wasn’t as hopeless in the kitchen as the show’s writers suggest — he was simply encountering a recipe that assumed knowledge he didn’t yet have. Rethinking the recipe in more inclusive and accessible ways allows for all kinds of cooks to take part in the joys and challenges of home cooking.

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Alexandrea Badescu is a British-Romanian food writer, researcher and creative. She draws from her background in natural sciences, distilling and art to explore connectivity within gastronomy. Alex is the founder of ‘Cheers to...’ – an upcoming publication focused on drinks and culture. Find her @alexbdistilling on Instagram.

1. A very insightful piece written by the food historian and author Nawal Nasrallah traces the journey of Kubbat Ḥāmuḍ Shalgham (a dumpling and turnip stew) across centuries and cooking manuscripts, from its Babylonian roots to contemporary Iraqi winter comfort-food.

2. Chef and TV presenter Briony May Williams has a ‘Baking with Makaton’ series of videos on her YouTube channel.

Catch up with the previous pieces from the ‘architecture of food’ issue:

Meat and Two Veg
Shellshocked
Priceless
No Catch
On Your Heart
The Whistleblower
Culture Club
The Making of Maamoul
No English Menu, Please