All the recipe books that I have written – and, as far as I know, all those written by other people for the same publishing companies – have photographs prepared from the original recipe by a home economist. She or he will always get in touch with the author if there is a problem. A stylist will organise plates, candles, glasses, cutlery, etc. and the home economist may add accompanying vegetables, salad etc. to the photograph of the final dish. (There are also often step-by-step photographs in the sorts of books I worked on.) All recipes are tested by the author, who has a testing budget, before they are submitted to the publisher.
This is not invariably the case with translations of cookbooks written in other languages and, in the course of editing, I have encountered all sorts of problems, sometimes because the translator is not a cookery expert and has gone completely off the rails and sometimes because it is quite clear to me that, for example, a moulded pudding would never set even if you left it in the fridge for 100 years. Incidentally, my favourite translator error of all time was a recipe in which she specified a quantity of jackals, unaware that, in this context, this was a name for a kind of bean rather than an African carnivore.
