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Are there any interesting diagrammatic recipe notations out there?

I have found Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams:

Nassi–Shneiderman

used here at Cooking for Engineers.

An activity diagram from here:

Activity Diag

Is there anything interesting in use by anyone?

I mean 'interesting' in two senses

  1. The diagram conveys the structure of the recipe. The user should be able to browse through a recipe book and get an impression what is being done. Similar recipes should have similar diagrams or parts

  2. The diagram uses some fancy mathematical notation that in some way reflects some properties of the recipe (that's why I show the Penrose diagram).

Penrose notation

Penrose

Actually I like neither of the two diagrams. The Nassi-Shneiderman is more of a nice tabular form than a diagram, and the activity diagram does not show much of the structure of the recipe. For example it does not convey any idea of time, and if you could not read the text, you had no idea what the recipe is about. The sub-recipes (like making the dough) are not very visible, either.

Glorfindel
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Dan
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2 Answers2

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Sometimes, when planning a new kitchen, you'd want a motion diagram. With bigger (restaurant/hotel) kitchens, we might pick some of the more complex recipes, and map how the staff would go about making them.

It's basically a diagram of the kitchen with who needs to go where and how often, derived from the recipe. Note that where maps clearly to what the person is doing at the time, so it goes "get stuff from fridge, go to mixing machine, use counter space (to lay out dough), move to ovens etc.

You could add diagrammatic notation for the activity fairly easily, but probably not for the foods themselves. If you do decide to draw up that many diagrammatic icons for foods and cooking activities, let me know and I'll happily use them.

Carmi
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It's not exactly a diagram, but it does convey the structure of the recipe and use 'fancy' (baker's) math... This is the formatting guide for formulas used by the Bread Baker's Guild of America. It includes a section for the total recipe, and each step of the recipe has a subsection.

BBGA Formatting Guideline

SourDoh
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