Typography in the kitchen: café, señor, 日本語, Ω

Recipe writing is multilingual whether you plan for it or not. A single shopping list can carry café, señor, jalapeño, crème fraîche and Gruyère without anyone thinking it unusual.

Japanese: 卵焼き (tamagoyaki), 昆布 (kombu), 白味噌 (shiro miso). Korean: 고추장 (gochujang), 김치찌개 (kimchi jjigae). Russian: борщ, окрошка, пельмени.

Right-to-left, which reverses the visual order without reversing the bytes: العربية (Arabic) and עברית (Hebrew). Mixing them inline with Latin text — like this العربية here — is where naive truncation produces mojibake.

Emoji are the real test, because several of these are multiple code points joined into one glyph. A ZWJ family: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. A regional-indicator flag: 🇯🇵. A keycap: 1️⃣. A skin-tone modifier: 👩🏽‍🍳. Counting BYTES instead of GRAPHEMES splits every one of them down the middle and produces garbage.

Mathematical and typographic marks that recipes actually use: ½ ⅓ ¼ ⅛, 180 °C, 350 °F, 20 × 30 cm, salt → taste, «guillemets», “smart quotes”, an em dash — and an ellipsis…

Published
Categorized as Essays Tagged

By Yuki Tanaka

Cooks from a small kitchen in Osaka.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *