I also learned programming with references to cooking recipes. But you know, biggest problem is that's bullshit. First of all because people can't translate a cooking recipe into something good without vast prior experience. But also because cooking recipes are single threaded and fairly simple and our current systems are anything but.

In fact I think the cooking recipe analogy does way more harm than good. And let's be honest, there's nothing weirder than X = X + 1, being the number one reason for why many people can't understand programming.