Ok, so it’s unusual, most people expect to look at a recipe and see the quantities in front of the ingredient names, and we’ve got it ‘backwards‘
Except the thing is that it really isn’t backwards, it’s better and more logical. Of course being used to the opposite you are not going to just sit back and absorb this easily, because it looks odd to you. Here then the explanation of why we write our recipes with the ingredients ‘written backwards‘.
The main reason is simply that it is easier visually to increase or edit the quantity when it is written on the left. This doesn’t make so much difference when you are viewing in on your computer screen, but if you decide to print one of our recipes out, and then want to scale the whole thing up or down, you’ll immediately realise how much easier it is with the numbers this way around, you can just cross one figure out and write the new one in the handy empty space to the right.
It’s not just scaling up, I have a huge folder of bits of scrawled or printed paper that contain recipes of my own or those I’ve gathered from other people where I have made changes over time as I’ve cooked them, and this way round just makes it so much easier.