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CeylonCookingAuthentic • Sri Lankan • Recipes

Opening your menu

Before you print

What the Print Sheet Does Differently

The print sheet is not a screenshot of the preview. It is built from the same draft with the colour stripped out, so a few things behave differently, and it is worth knowing which before you feed forty sheets through the office printer.

  • A dish with no price prints with nothing where the price goes. It reads as a mistake rather than as free, so fill it in or take the dish off.
  • Anything marked sold out is dropped from paper rather than struck through. A printed menu outlives the service that ran out, and a line through a dish makes the whole sheet look old.
  • A dish you have not named yet is left off too, so a half-typed row cannot follow you to the table.
  • Diets print as short marks, V, VG, GF, and heat prints as dots rather than words. Put a key at the bottom of the page if your regulars are new to it.
  • Press download before you close the tab. The menu lives in this browser only, and the file you download is also how you carry the draft to another machine.

Writing the dish

Three things worth doing while you are in here, whether the words came from the library or from you.

Texture, Not Adjectives
A guest cannot taste delicious. They can picture soft ribbons of egg and a slow chilli heat at the back of the throat.
Set the Heat Honestly
A medium you have to apologise for at the table costs you more than a hot dish somebody skipped.
Keep the Local Name
It gives your regulars the word they already use, and everybody else something to say out loud when they order.

The longer version, with what the library already holds and where each section comes from, is on the Menu Maker page.

Know What You Are Importing

Import goes faster if you already know what you are looking for. These open in a new tab, so your draft stays exactly where it is.

Or open the full recipe index and search it the way a guest would.