Cooking and Recipes
Learn 20 A2 English words for cooking and recipes - ingredient, chop, stir, roast, leftovers - plus the recipe vs receipt trap, a story and a quiz.
A1 gave you the food. A2 gives you what you do to it. These 20 words are the verbs of a kitchen plus the nouns you need to follow a recipe in English – and one word that almost every learner says wrongly, because it looks like a word you already know from the shopping lesson. Then come and sit in my mother’s kitchen with a notebook, where I spent an afternoon trying to write down a recipe that does not exist.
20 words to learn
The 20 words
/ˈresəpi/
The instructions for making a dish. Say RESS-i-pee – three parts.
Can you send me the recipe?
/ɪnˈɡriːdiənt/
One of the foods you need to make a dish.
The first ingredient is one large onion.
/tʃɒp/
To cut food into small pieces.
Chop the onion very small.
/slaɪs/
To cut food into thin flat pieces. Also a noun: a slice of bread.
Slice the aubergines thickly.
/piːl/
To take the skin off fruit or vegetables.
Peel the potatoes first.
/stɜː(r)/
To move food round with a spoon while it cooks.
Do not stir it too much.
/pɔː(r)/
To make liquid flow from one container into another.
Pour hot water over the meat.
/æd/
To put one more thing in.
Add the spices at the end.
/mɪks/
To put things together so they become one.
Mix the spices into the rice.
/teɪst/
To eat a very small amount to check the flavour.
Always taste the water before you use it.
/beɪk/
To cook in an oven, usually bread or cakes.
She does not bake anything, ever.
/rəʊst/
To cook meat or vegetables in an oven with oil.
Roast the cauliflower for forty minutes.
/ɡrɪl/
To cook with strong heat from above.
Grill them until they are dark at the edges.
/stiːm/
To cook over boiling water, not in it.
Steam the carrots for eight minutes.
/ˈʌvn/
The hot box you bake and roast in. Say UH-vun.
Put it in a hot oven.
/ˈsɔːspən/
A deep round pot with a handle, used on the cooker.
Everything ends up in one enormous saucepan.
/rɔː/
Not cooked at all.
The rice was still raw in the middle.
/bɜːn/
To damage food with too much heat. Past: burnt or burned.
I burnt the bottom of the pan.
/ˈteɪsti/
With a good flavour. Less formal than delicious.
It was not hers, but it was tasty.
/ˈleftəʊvəz/
The food that is not eaten and is kept for later. Always plural.
There were no leftovers at all.
Now read the story
Story · all 20 words
Enough
I asked my mother to write down her recipe for maqluba, and she said yes immediately and with enthusiasm. That was four months ago. I am still waiting.
It is not that she does not want to give it to me. It is that the recipe does not exist in the form I asked for. When I finally sat down in her kitchen with a notebook and a pen, this is roughly what I got.
“How much rice?” “Enough.” “Enough for how many people?” “For the people who are coming.” I wrote down the word enough and moved on with my life. Every single ingredient was like this.
What she actually does is roughly the following. First you peel the aubergines, slice them thickly, put salt on them and then forget about them for half an hour. You chop one onion extremely small and add it to the meat. You pour hot water over the top and let the whole thing cook slowly. You do not stir it much – she was very firm about that, and it is the only instruction of the entire afternoon that arrived with a reason attached.
The aubergines go under the grill until they are dark at the edges. She used to fry them, but she says her heart prefers it this way now. Meanwhile the cauliflower goes into the oven to roast, the carrots steam above the rice, and eventually everything is built into one enormous saucepan in layers whose exact order I did not write down quickly enough.
You mix the spices into the rice with your hands, not a spoon. And you taste the water before you pour it in – this, she says, is the step that everybody skips and nobody should, because if the water is wrong then nothing that happens afterwards will save you. She does not bake anything, incidentally, ever. She says baking is a different kind of patience and she was not given that one.
Then it cooks. And at the very end you turn the whole pan upside down onto a wide tray, and either it holds its shape or it collapses, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about which.
Mine was raw in the middle the first time. The second time I burnt the bottom so thoroughly that we ate the top half and agreed not to discuss it. The third time it was genuinely tasty – not hers, but tasty – and there were no leftovers, which in my family is the only review that has ever counted.
I still do not have the recipe. I have four pages of notes that say things like enough and until it looks right. I have slowly begun to suspect that this was the point, and that she has been teaching me something other than cooking for four months.
The word almost everybody says wrongly. Recipe has three syllables and ends in an /i/ sound: RESS-i-pee. It does not rhyme with receipt.
And be careful, because you learned receipt in the A1 shopping lesson and the two are completely different:
recipe = the instructions for cooking a dish
receipt = the paper the shop gives you after you pay
Cooking verbs, sorted by method. This is the fastest way to remember them:
In water: boil, steam (steam is above the water, not in it)
In oil: fry
In the oven: bake (bread, cakes, biscuits), roast (meat, potatoes, vegetables)
Under strong heat: grill
So you bake a cake but you roast a chicken. Using the wrong one is not a serious mistake, but the right one sounds much better.
Recipes use the imperative. English instructions have no subject at all: Chop the onion. Add the water. Do not stir. Never You chop the onion in a written recipe.
Quantities you will meet: a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of oil, a pinch of pepper, a handful of parsley, a slice of bread, a clove of garlic.
Leftovers is always plural: we ate the leftovers, never a leftover.
Preparing: peel, chop, slice, mix, add, pour, stir, taste.
Cooking: bake, roast, grill, steam (and boil and fry from A1).
The kit: oven, saucepan.
The result: raw, burnt, tasty, leftovers.
The paper: recipe, ingredient.
Write the recipe for the simplest thing you can cook, in six imperative sentences. Start every one with a verb.
Now practise with the questions below.
Check your understanding
Answer the questions below. You will see instantly if you are right.
Want feedback from a real tutor on your reading, writing and speaking?
Book a Free Consultation