The Joy of Cooking's waffle recipe suggests 1/2c butter, but says you can drop that to 1/4c or bump it to 1c depending on how decadently crisp you want the result to be.

Note also that a lot of times the variations are to account for some other inherent variation, like adjusting the sugar in a pie depending on how sweet your fruit is.

Yes, that is ideal. List exactly what you did in your ingredients list. Then add information about what you change and the impact of this. Kenji López-Alt's recipe is the perfect example of this. I prefer starting from the Jacques Torres' recipe but I still go back to Kenji's article. It shows me the impact of moving any of the dials for the cookie I want.

"Note also that a lot of times the variations are to account for some other inherent variation, like adjusting the sugar in a pie depending on how sweet your fruit is."

Yes, but that should be called out.

The key thing is that a recipe should be an actual recipe. It should be precise documentation that allows you to reproduce a product as much as possible. Prose is what actually is teaching you how to cook.

Maybe differs in a restaurant or business, but for home cooking thinking of recipes as precise seems absurd to me. Its 600g... a number that was clearly rounded, and I would bet they eyeballed the amount they wanted and then measured it. Theres too much imprecision in a home kitchen to pretend to be precise

It's actually incredibly frustrating when trying to follow a cook book _because_ they're often so vague. Even things like "4 cloves of garlic" are nerve-wracking because I have no idea how big the average garlic clove is, whether mine is above or below that, how much that matters, in what ways that will affect the taste, how I should accommodate for more/less garlic later, and so on. Garlic's an easy example, but this frustration applies to almost every ingredient -- especially when they're "to taste" or "until brown" (how brown?) or "until ready" and so on.

Give me 600g, give me "stir for 2 seconds", give me detail! If I wanted to go off-book, I wouldn't be using a recipe!

Home cooking is an improvised activity, primarily because its so lenient in what it'll accept. Of course, maybe the french will tell you otherwise, but most food doesn't come with any intent to be 100% reproducible (and it'd be extremely boring if it were), or "designed". They come out leniently tasty, and they look good leniently.

Until brown? Until it looks like a good shade of brown. Until ready? Until it feels like its ready. To taste? Until its tasty.

Its imprecise, because its an ancient activity. You do what seems like a good idea, and don't do it next time if it fails. Its a game where losing is kinda fun (unless you're "designing" food, which I have nothing to say about)

I recognize that some people enjoy the art of cooking, but I personally don't. I cook to make food so I can survive. Perhaps I just haven't found the right cook books for my demographic.