Recipe for Disaster

Slashfood.com has a bizarre report here about a typo in a recipe that resulted in four people being poisoned (despite what sounds a massive effort by the magazine to warn subscribers of the danger once they found out about it.) Thanks to some research I did for a story, I happen to know large quantities of nutmeg is dangerous. Even if I didn't, though, I doubt I'd put what is roughly equivalent to 60 teaspoons of any spice into a single recipe.

But: I did follow a Cooking Light magazine recipe once that called for among other things three very hot peppers, and fortunately tested it myself before serving it (and just about scorched my mouth off.) Since we don't like our food that hot, I tossed it out and made it over, this time with 1/8 of one pepper. In the next month's issue, the editors apologized for what turned out to be a typo with the peppers in that recipe (which redeemed me; my guy thought I'd messed up something.)

I'd rather make someone else's recipe than share one of my own with strangers. Unless it's a 100% foolproof dish like my No-Brainer Fudge, I always worry other people won't like it. When I was asked to contribute one of my own recipes for a GCI book I wrote, I actually panicked. I put together about a dozen of my best dishes and then had my family taste them and vote before I decided which one might be good enough to share with the readers. Then I wrote up the recipe (and promptly made it again following the written version to make sure I'd listed everything correctly and in the right order.)

I like writing about food and cooking in general terms; I did a lot of that in the GCI novels and it was fun (because it was not specific enough to make me worry, I guess.) I also like reading recipes other authors sometimes put in themed anthologies or in the back of their novels. Sometimes what writers like to cook tells you something you otherwise might not know about them. For example: the reason I like my no-brainer fudge so much is that I hate using candy thermometers; over the years I've broken about twenty of them.

Readers, do you like to see actual recipes included in the fiction books you read? Would you enjoy the story more if the author told you how to make a dish that appears in the novel? Writers, what's your stand on writing recipes for your readers?