Peer review: your grandmother's lasagna

Manuscript: "Lasagna" (untitled; the title is ours) Format: index card, both sides, then up the margin Submitted by: the estate Reviewer: one grandchild (conflict of interest declared below)

#Summary of submission

The manuscript describes a procedure for producing a lasagna. It is forty years old. It is written in two inks and one pencil, and at some point it was folded into quarters and carried somewhere, and we would like to know where, and we never will.

The card asserts that the procedure "serves 8." We will return to this claim.

#Major concerns

The methods are not reproducible. The manuscript instructs the reader to "season until it looks right." No definition of right is offered. The reader is presumed to know, and the presumption is the problem, because the one person who knew is the one person who no longer holds office hours.

Quantities are given in nonstandard units. The sauce requires "enough." The cheese layer calls for "more than you think." The garlic is specified as "some, then some more, then stop being a coward." These are not measurements. These are judgments, issued by an authority, and the authority is not available for consultation.

The oven temperature is missing entirely. In its place, the manuscript says "you'll know." We do not know. We have never known. We ran the procedure at 350, 375, and 400 degrees, and all three produced a lasagna, and none of them produced the lasagna, and the difference is not detectable by instruments. We checked. We bought instruments.

#Minor concerns

The yield claim of "serves 8" could not be validated. In three supervised trials the manuscript served four, four, and three respectively, with all participants declining to explain where the rest went. We suspect the original figure of 8 was only ever achieved under the direct supervision of the author, who enforced portions by looking at people.

There is a stain on the lower left quadrant of the card. We tested nothing. The stain is evidence, and it is also sauce, and we have decided it is load-bearing and will not be removing it.

#Attempted replication

Three trials, conducted over four months, using the author's own pan, which the estate released to us under conditions we agreed to without reading — a lapse we have owned publicly in our interview with a man who would not have made it.

Trial one followed the card exactly and produced a competent lasagna with nothing wrong with it, which is the most damning result possible.

Trial two attempted to correct for nostalgia by having a participant eat it in the author's kitchen, at the author's table, at 1PM on a Sunday. The participant reported it was closer. The participant was then quiet for a while.

Trial three added more garlic on the theory that the coward line was directed at us personally, across time. This produced the best result to date, at approximately 85% of reference, and we now believe the missing 15% is not an ingredient.

#Conflict of interest

The reviewer ate the reference lasagna approximately two hundred times between 1994 and 2019 and is therefore the least objective person alive on this topic, and also the only qualified one. Both things are true. The editors will have to live with it, as we do.

#Decision

Accept. No revisions. Revisions are not possible.

The manuscript is not a set of instructions. We spent four months treating it as one, and it is not one. It is a recording of a person — her thumb on the scale, her contempt for measuring cups, her certainty — formatted as a recipe because a recipe was the only document type available to her. The methods are unreproducible because the method was her.

We recommend the card be laminated, and we recommend it never be transcribed, because the transcription would fix the errors, and the errors are where she is.

#Recommendation to readers

Run the procedure anyway. Fail at it on purpose, at 85%, forever. It keeps better that way.

Related: the office fridge: an archaeological survey — food as a record of people who are not coming back. And if you would like to be judged that harshly by something you are feeding, feed the baby: it also will not tell you what it wants, and it also expects you to know.