That was an interesting article, and it hit upon many of the things I have noticed through my years of collecting cookbooks (and cooking, of course!). So many of those early books had countless recipes crammed into them, partly because the instructions were so vague, and figure that everyone knew how long to cook something, at what heat level, etc., etc. Then there is the other extreme we sometimes see, assuming everyone reading the book is just picking up a pan for the first time, and there are only 50 recipes in a 300 page book.
Like Becky, I am all for precise recipes, as a rule, partly due to much of my cooking being in the Asian cuisines, and many of these recipes have a large number of ingredients, which is sort of hard to wing it with, unless you are born into it, and have been doing it for a long time. It would be very easy to make a dish over-salty or over-spicy, just adding things at whim. And, like I tell people who say they never follow recipes, how do they repeat something, if they come up with something utterly fantastic? If you are making a recipe with 3 or 4 ingredients it may be easy to repeat, but not something with over 20!
I sort of agree with Jacques Pépin saying that somebody should make a recipe once or twice, exactly as is, before starting to tweak it. How do we know if we have just found a perfect recipe for something? Of course there are exceptions, such as the number of chile peppers in a dish, which I may change the first time.
