Most amateur cooks rely on written recipes, but what happens when the professionals make a mistake?

It's a memory which occasionally wakes me up with a start in the middle of the night, bathed in a light sheen of abject terror. One crisp Monday in mid-December I received a cheery tweet from a fellow food writer which filled me with a very unseasonal chill. "Loved your Christmas recipes in G2 today!" she trilled. "Can't wait to try your sugar-free mincemeat, as am trying to cut down my intake. Does it really work?"

Hands trembling, stomach in revolt, I ripped open the paper. Sure enough, my "perfect" mincemeat was a Puritan mix of grated apple and dried fruit, with nary so much as a grain of sugar as a nod to festive cheer, let alone the 200g muscovado I'd scribbled down in my gravy-stained kitchen notebook. The mistake, of course, was all mine – and mercifully easy to rectify online – but I do apologise to anyone disappointed by this spuriously healthy take on a Christmas classic.
Still, I comfort myself with the fact that my error, although doubtless unpalatable, wasn't actually dangerous, unlike Antony Worrall Thompson's claim to a healthy-living magazine, back in 2008, that foraged henbane was "great in salads" – that's the same henbane, true-crime fans, that the notorious Dr Crippen is thought to have used to kill his wife. Had Wozza been a crossword fan, the name "bane", an old-fashioned term for poison, might have been some clue that this plant, which can cause hallucinations, drowsiness, and in larger amounts, loss of consciousness, seizures, and death, wasn't the one he was thinking of. Worrall Thompson, who mixed up the noxious weed with the distinctly more edible fat hen, admitted the mistake was "embarrassing".

Like my own faux pas, however, his mistake was easily corrected – where a book is concerned, things aren't so quickly smoothed over. Across the pond, Random House was forced to take one cookery title off the market after six months when it was discovered that the custard recipe, which called for simmering a tin of condensed milk in a slow cooker for four hours, caused the tin to blow up halfway through cooking, destroying the slow cooker and anything in its path, as well as any prospect of pudding.

Some blame these errors on shrinking budgets, which mean that editors have less money to spend testing and checking recipes, but it's certainly not a new problem. Mrs Beeton is riddled with the kind of silly mistakes which result when you "borrow" recipes from other people, while Nicola Humble recounts, in her history of the cookery book, Culinary Pleasures, the cautionary wartime tale of the publishers who put out a make do-and-mend dish with a potentially fatal combination of ingredients (the details of which are left tantalisingly opaque). Once the error was noticed, and as many copies recalled as possible, they endured an anxious wait for tearful complaints. None came – and they were forced to conclude that no one had actually tried the recipe, which is quite possibly the food writer's second worst nightmare.

Recipes that simply don't work may not kill you immediately, but the stress of explaining to seven hungry guests that unfortunately their dinner is in the bin could well shorten one's life expectancy in the long run. Even the tediously reliable Delia isn't immune: fans claimed that the quick seafood risotto she cooked up for her Waitrose campaign last year produced such "vile" results that the affair was investigated by the BBC's consumer affairs programme, Watchdog, for all the world as if this national treasure was another cowboy plumber or dodgy used car dealer.

Of course, any article on the subject of culinary disaster isn't complete without mention of the River Café chocolate nemesis, a dish which, despite rave reviews from diners in the west London restaurant, steadfastly refused to work for home cooks, who famously produced something more like "a kind of cowpat" than the decadent dessert they were hoping for. The late Rose Gray's slightly unsatisfactory response was that "It's a recipe you need to make a couple of times before you get it right". I doubt many people attempted it more than once: humiliation doesn't tend to whet the appetite for seconds.

That failure, from a recipe which clearly works beautifully in the restaurant itself, was blamed in some quarters on the difference between professional and domestic ovens whereas sometimes the error seems to be with the publishers. Nigella's Feast, for example, contains a recipe for a chocolate orange cake that includes a direction to "cream together the butter and sugar" – which would come as a nasty surprise to the prospective baker, given no butter is mentioned in the ingredients. (When chocolatier Paul A Young tried both versions, he concluded the butter was a red herring – the cake turns out much better without it.)

Bakery, being an exact science, is notoriously dangerous ground for food writers. The first edition of the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook provoked so many outraged complaints online that the publishers were compelled to issue a sheet of baking tips (pdf) along with the corrections. It begins with the plaintive plea: "Sounds simple, but please do follow the recipes exactly as written!" – because you can test a recipe until you're blue in the face (and stuffed to the gills) but you can't account for the cook who thinks they know better. The kind of cook who substitutes crème fraîche for double cream, or who leaves a dish in the oven for 10 minutes longer, "just in case", and then blames the writer for the inevitable disappointment that results. Most dishes are robust enough to withstand a little light tweaking of course, providing you know what you're doing – hell, I've built an entire column out of it – but unless you've followed the instructions to the letter, I take the view that any ensuing disaster (or triumph!) is entirely your own.

Do you tend to follow recipes faithfully or use them as a rough guide, and have you had any memorable disasters from either approach? Are cookbooks more reliable than magazines or newspapers – and does one failure put you off a particular writer for good?

{loadposition user38} source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/sep/19/cookbook-errors-recipes-for-disaster

source: http://www.europerank.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/56665-recipes-for-disaster