I ran the lunchroom at an elementary school here in Macon for twenty-six years, until I retired in 1994, and I have edited three editions of the cookbook for the Women's Circle at Mulberry Creek Baptist Church: 1979, 1988 and 1997. I know a recipe card. I know what happens when one is set wrong, because I have fielded the telephone calls.

This spring Dixie Swanger, who is president of the Circle this year, said it was high time our recipes went on the Internet, so the members who have moved off could get at them. Everybody looked at me. My grandson showed me Notepad and the File Manager, and I went to looking at how other people do it.

This summer I printed off forty-two recipes from pages all over the Web, just to see. Thirty-one of them came out of my printer as one long paragraph: the amounts, the ingredients and the directions all run together like a letter with no punctuation. You can't cook from that. You can't even shop from it. So before the Circle's recipes go up, I am going to get this right, and I've written down what I learned for anybody else fixing to do the same.

Why It Happens

A browser does not pay one bit of attention to the line breaks you type. You can press Enter after every ingredient, neat as a pin, and the browser will run them all together, one after the other with a space between, until something in the code tells it to stop. So if you type this:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
Cream the butter and sugar.

the browser shows you this:

And that is how you get a recipe that prints as one long paragraph. The cure is to tell the browser where every line goes. Here's how I do it.

1. Ingredients in a Table

Put the ingredients in a table with two columns: the amounts on the left, the ingredients on the right. One row for each ingredient. (TR is a row, TD is a box in the row.)

<table border="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<td align="right">2</td>
<td>cups all-purpose flour</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right">1</td>
<td>cup sugar</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right">&frac12;</td>
<td>cup butter, softened</td>
</tr>
</table>

That comes out like this:

You could put a <br> at the end of every line instead, and it would print better than nothing. But the table lines the amounts up in a column, so your eye can run straight down them while you measure, and every ingredient starts in the same place. That's how a printed cookbook does it, and there's a reason.

2. Steps in a Numbered List

Put the directions in an ordered list. OL starts the list and LI starts each step.

<ol>
<li>Heat the oven to 350&deg;F.</li>
<li>Cream the butter and sugar
until light.</li>
<li>Stir in the flour.</li>
</ol>

That comes out like this:

The browser numbers the steps for you. Better yet, if you go back later and put a new step in the middle, it renumbers all the rest. In twenty years of cookbook committees I never once saw a typist go back and renumber the rest.

3. Degrees and Fractions

A few things in a recipe need a code of their own, so the browser will draw the proper mark. Each code starts with an ampersand and ends with a semicolon. Type it exactly, small letters and all:

Those three fractions are the only ones there are. There is no code for a third or an eighth, so 1/3 cup stays typed out with a slash, and so does 1/8 teaspoon. That's all right. Just leave a space between a whole number and a typed fraction, 1 1/3 cups, so nobody reads it as eleven-thirds. With the codes you don't need the space: 1&frac12; comes out 1½.

And please don't make a degree sign out of a little letter o, or write "350 degrees" in one recipe and "350°" in the next. Pick one and keep to it. Which brings me to my rules.

Mae's Rules

One recipe to a page. A person who wants your pound cake does not want to print four pages of your chicken salad, your pimento cheese and your sister's coleslaw to get it. One recipe, one page, one sheet of paper.

The same abbreviations every time. Here are the ones our cookbook uses, and now my Web pages too:

I have seen "tsp." and "t." and "T." on the same card. A capital T and a little t cost my lunchroom a whole batch of cornbread one morning in 1971. Six hundred children and not one of them would eat it, and they were right.

Say what size pan. A 9-by-13 and an 8-by-8 are not the same cake. One comes out thin and dry and the other runs over in the oven. Every recipe should say the pan, the oven temperature and about how long, right up top, before the ingredients.

List the ingredients in the order you use them. Then the cook can go straight down the list and never has to hunt.

A plain white background, so it prints clean. Most browsers leave the background off when they print. That pale yellow writing you picked to go with your gingham comes out pale yellow on white paper, and nobody can read it in a hot kitchen. For anything somebody's going to print: white page, black letters. My front page is yellow because it's my kitchen. Look at the recipe pages and you'll see they're white, because they're for printing.

Print it yourself before you put it up. Then cook from your printout, once, start to finish. If you have to go look at the screen for anything, fix the page.

Now You Try It

A Blank Card to Copy. Everything above, put together on one card with the code underneath. Copy it into Notepad, fill in your recipe, and save it.

My Peach Cobbler, Set Right. The one I made for the last day of school every year for twenty-six years, set on the page the way I'm asking you to set yours. Print it and see.

A Page Worth a Visit

The Ladies' Aid of Harmony Corners Community Church has put some of the recipes from their Fiftieth Anniversary cookbook on the Web at the Church Potluck Cookbook, typed just as they are in their book, with the notes the ladies wrote in the margins. Their Rules of the Potluck are worth the trip all by themselves. They say a 9-by-13 is the official unit of measure of the potluck, and after forty years of covered-dish suppers I cannot argue with that.