Comment by zebraflask

Aha, I've often vaguely suspected as much with certain well-known food columns. I wrote it off to incompetent cooks, but it makes more sense that they were just making it up as they went along.

One that sticks in my mind was a recipe that called for a dozen whole cloves, where really you'd just use one or two. If any.

A dozen whole cloves, used in the way the recipe called for, would make pretty much any dish painfully inedible.