Recipe Writing

With Personality: Infusing Humour, Catchphrases And Quirks Into Basic Food Content

Quick Summary

Recipe writing gets more memorable, not less clear, the moment a writer lets their humour, catchphrases and everyday lifestyle habits show up inside the instructions themselves. As long as every bit of personality sits beside the direction, rather than buried inside it. The goal was never to choose between entertaining a reader and instructing them, but to build directions that people actually enjoy following, written in a voice that sounds like one specific person cooking next to you rather than a manual translated from another language.

Deep Dive

Cookbook editor and writing coach Dianne Jacob has spent years arguing against sterile, equipment-focused recipe lines like “In a bowl, combine...” phrasing that reads, in her words, like a bad translation from another language. Her point does not insinuate that clarity isn't important. It is, but a reader following a recipe, alone in their kitchen, wants to feel like a real person is behind the page, someone who has made the dish many times and is walking them through it. 

This holds of recipe writing specifically, but it's true of instructional content in general: assembly instructions, how-to guides, even onboarding emails all land better when a reader can sense a person on the other end, rather than feeling like they are scanning a lifeless document. For a creator or content writer, this matters even more, as personality is what makes a piece of recipe writing yours recognisably in a feed full of near-identical recipe posts. Also, different styles of writing carry different relationships with an audience as well.

When Voice Overpowers In Recipe Writing

Writing coaches and recipe editors are consistent on one point, that clarity comes first, always. If a reader trips because they can’t decipher the text or language, they either abandon the recipe altogether or attempt it and get a bad result, and neither outcome reflects well on the writer, however funny the caption or anecdotes were. The failure here isn't ‘too much personality, but personality placed in the wrong spot, where the instruction needs more focus, like hiding inside a measurement, beside a temperature mention.

Simply put, in terms of a salad, the chopped fruits, vegetables and other ingredients need to be present first, as well as the salad dressing. Then comes the addition of optional ingredients like sweeteners, nuts and sometimes cheeses, without which the salad is still a salad, but with these it’ll be more delicious. So the extra add-ins are the unique personality you add during recipe writing. This is especially important for visual content that makes viewers cling to the little anecdote, humour or catchphrases in the midst of a serious recipe writing format.

How To Build Personality Into Recipe Writing

Your content having personality is what will make your content stand out, even recipes in this matter. Here are some tips:

1. Clarity first, then character developement

Write the instructions correctly first, with exact quantities, exact timing, exact technique, and only then go back and add voice around it. Treat personality as seasoning added at the end of cooking, not an ingredient folded in from the start.

2. Save the jokes for the sidelines

Headnotes, asides, and the line before or after an instruction are safe ground for humour. The instruction itself, like ‘fold in the eggs’, ‘bake at 180°C for 22 minutes’, should stay simple enough that a reader skimming with little time still gets it right the first time.

3. Focus on few catchphrases

A signature phrase only works through repetition, so it's better to have a single line a reader comes to expect than a dozen one-off jokes that never recur. Personal branding advice on this point is consistent: pick the phrase you'd be happy repeating hundreds of times, and use it in the same kind of moment every time: a specific step, a specific warning, a specific sign-off, so it becomes a marker of your writing rather than a random punchline.

4. More lifestyle details, less adjectives

‘This is SO good’ is what haunts many viewers or readers when looking at recipes, but does not tell them something they can't already guess. A specific, lived-in detail, like the fact that this is the dish used to be made by Anthony Bourdain every Sunday before a long week, or the one dragged out whenever a guest cancels last minute, does more to build personality than any number of exclamation points, without messing up the clarity of the method at all.

5. Match tone to the recipe step

This is not for the high tension steps that usually revolve around time, temperature and technique sensitivities. For example, sneaking in references to a pillow when talking about a batter, or the proofing of the dough takes away from the delicacy of these events. Instead these areas can use some bridging language, like ‘let it rest while you tidy up’, while the dough rises. When there’s room to breathe you can sneak in something light-hearted or a fun fact.

6. Focus on addressing one person

The “hello guys, welcome”, is not bad, but it is quite generic and does not make the reader or viewer feel special. In fact, recipe editors repeatedly point to second-person, conversational phrasing as the difference between recipe writing that feels alive and writing that feels clinical. Addressing one reader directly, the way an experienced cook explains a dish to a friend in their kitchen, does more for personality than any single joke or exclamation could.

7. Reuse structure in different flavours

The same voice doesn't read the same way on every platform, and it shouldn't try to. The accepted framework in brand-voice writing is that voice, which is the core personality, stays fixed, while tone flexes by format: punchier and more clipped for a Reel caption, more discursive for a blog headnote, paced for spoken delivery in a video script. Consistency lives in the underlying personality, not in using identical sentences everywhere.

8. Test it on a stranger

The best check for whether personality has started to obscure an instruction is a letting someone who is not involved in the creation process or familiar with your work. They will be your dummy audience before the script has be translated into food content or a recipe in writing. If they can finish your recipe, the voice is doing its job. If they can't, something needs to move out of the instruction and into the aside next to it.

How To Adapt Tone Across Audiences, Platforms And Subjects

Your voice is what matters when it comes to recipe writing and it only survives long-term if it can flex without breaking. The tone is also important and it’s how that personality gets dialled up or down for a given context. Whether it is a blog post or a social media content, they do not need a different personality. The content should be delivered at a different pace, with different amounts of restraint, depending on three things:

• Audience: Pick your target audience, as someone like a beginner cook will stick to recipes using more plain-language and reassurance around technique, while a more experienced audience can handle shorthand, inside jokes, and faster pacing without losing the plot.

• Platform: A caption has seconds to land a joke before someone scrolls past; a blog post or long-form recipe page has room to let a story breathe before the method even starts.

• Subject: A weekday one-pot dinner can carry a more loose, funnier tone throughout. A dish associated with a festival, a health claim, or anything culturally sensitive needs the humour dialled back and the factual, contextual writing brought forward instead. The voice stays present, but it steps back to let accuracy lead.

The common thing across all three is that the underlying personality, which is the specific catchphrases, the specific lifestyle references, the specific sense of humour, doesn't change.

Quick Reference Of Where Personality Fits Best

Recipe Writing Style 101

Personality is a fancy way of saying your recipe is quirky, not in the way some food creators promote it by creating bizarre content around cockroach-themed bread to ‘uniquely’ coloured foods that rub you the wrong way. You can for fun’s sake choose to do something as bizarre like that, but sticking to the basics with the recipes doing the talking with a few clever lines will reel people in.