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Linguistic study reveals personal pronouns are far more common in recipes than expected and that chatty cooking recipes go back at least 160 years
Personal pronouns like “I” and “you” are among the most common words in the English language – but that doesn’t mean they occur equally often in all kinds of texts. “If you think about it, you wouldn’t really expect to find any personal pronouns in cooking recipes”, says Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, Professor of English and Digital Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology. That’s because recipes have a very special way of using language: in a typical sentence like “Add potatoes and cover with salted water,” recipes miss all the opportunities to use personal pronouns. Instead of saying “YOU add potatoes and cover THEM with salted water,” recipes only imply the “you” at the beginning of the instruction and leave out the “them” other texts would use to refer to the potatoes a second time. To find out if this is systematic, Sanchez-Stockhammer investigated a corpus of 280 recipes from the internet. She found personal pronouns in recipes after all – just less than half as many as in other texts. And when recipes use the pronoun “it”, it often has a grammatical function, e.g. in “It takes a bit of time, but it's worth it.”
The researcher also determined how common personal pronouns are in the individual parts of the recipes. The titles did not contain any, and the ingredients lists very rarely, like in “540g white fish chunks (I like to use pollock or basa)”. The introduction, by contrast, used even more personal pronouns than many other types of English texts. One reason for this is that the introduction of a recipe often tells a personal story, in which the authors explain why they love that particular food, or how it has come to them – for example through their grandmother, who always used to bake that delicious cake.
Introductions to online recipes are often so long that many users on the internet complain about having to read a whole life story before reaching the actual recipe. At first glance, it would seem that this is an internet phenomenon, with recipes imitating cooking blogs. But Sanchez-Stockhammer’s study reveals that giving recipes a personal touch isn’t new at all: for example, a popular Australian cookbook raved about apple dumplings as early as 1864 (“we hardly know anything better”).
The linguist sums it up: “Cooking recipes don’t just tell you how to prepare a meal – they are full of emotions. Anyone who shares a recipe also wants to share their joy about food. And the role of personal pronouns in all this is to establish a relationship between the author, the reader and the recipe.”
For an entertaining summary of the study and the stories behind it, tune in to the latest episode of Sanchez-Stockhammer’s science podcast, ‘Linguistics Behind the Scenes’.
Listen to the podcast on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smYb0pm-1x8), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4OGU0cbQqp9MjisAnySBJA) and Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-cooking-recipes-about-you-and-me-cookb...).
Information about the podcast “Linguistics Behind the Scenes”: https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/sections/edling/sciencecommunication/pod...
Prof. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, tel. +49 (0)371 531-32444, email christina.sanchez@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer. 2025. The linguistic functions of personal pronouns in online cooking recipes. Anglistik 36(2). 129-156. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2025/2/10
If you want to present recipes in an appealing way, don't just illustrate them. A clear and emotiona ...
Source: Photo: TU Chemnitz/Uwe Meinhold
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If you want to present recipes in an appealing way, don't just illustrate them. A clear and emotiona ...
Source: Photo: TU Chemnitz/Uwe Meinhold
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