"No return to the 'original' recipe is possible because its original form has been eaten. In the form of a written text, the recipe itself is already a 'translation' from a physical form. It has been translated into language from a source text--from a hot red sauce text. Unlike an ancient scroll, however, the sauce cannot be found in a tomb. Someone ate it, sometime earlier, somewhere. Despite the feeling of stability that a printed text inspires, it is only one annotation, a receipt of one instance of the recipe being cooked. The recipe is an altogether more slippery entity." --Rebecca May Johnson, SMALL FIRES, page 82