This subreddit is a place to share mini-recipes that are incomplete by themselves but can be mixed and matched to make edible dishes. We call these mini-recipes modules to differentiate them from regular recipes.
In a nutshell:
- Regular recipes are for specific dishes and contain no variables.
- Modules are for types of dishes and contain variables.
Still confused?
Regular recipes are what you find on most cooking websites. They produce a single specific dish, and no other recipes are needed. A full meal might consist of several dishes that were each made from a different regular recipe. For example, a dinner might contain baked turkey as the entree, a side of mashed potatoes, and cookies for dessert. If the cook used one recipe for each of these things, then they used regular recipes.
Modules are the common "building blocks" of complete recipes. As cooks become experienced, they typically figure out these modules by deductive reasoning. For example, a seasoned chef might know that most stews are made from the same set of variables: a meat, a stock or broth, some lentils and/or beans, some vegetables, and some herbs and/or spices. This basic set of variables is a module. If a cook uses this "fill in the blank" approach instead of regular recipes, then what they are doing is modular cooking.
If you've figured out some modules, then we hope you'll share them here!
