Ah, you're making a Hanlon's razor sort of argument.

In which case the layer of deceit is the conceit that the editors of popular cookbooks can spot and will correct obvious BS.

The "layer of deceit" is that they claim you can do something in a particular way within a certain time frame and that this is not actually possible. And cook books aren't written by editors.

I'm responding to moistly's comment, not the essay.

Certainly editors don't write cookbooks. But they decide what to publish. I personally think the essay is correct. My followup on this thread is that even if the essay isn't correct, there are still other "layers of deceit" to consider.

The top-level of this thread was dexwiz's statement "I don't think recipes lie". I pointed out how that statement doesn't jibe with the presented evidence. moistly followed up that it wasn't a lie, but ignorance "by people who don’t know what they are doing."

My observation is that if we accept that the authors aren't lying, but are simply incompetent, then a different layer of deceit arises - the belief that cooking columns in national newspapers and cookbooks by reputable publishing companies will have enough oversight and not publish recipes 'by people who don’t know what they are doing'.

But editors are likely to be the type to change “brown” to “caramelize” because it sounds more upscale.