Cookery books are governed by their own laws not only in the choice of vocabulary and fixed expressions, but also grammar and style. Their translations should accordingly not only be linguistically impeccable and technically accurate, but also read as if written by a professional. This article offers new insights into the translation norms and conventions of cookbooks and recipes by discussing how corpus tools can help choose the most appropriate collocation or turn of phrase and validate hypotheses concerning crucial but non-salient choices at the lexical, syntactic, stylistic, spelling and punctuation levels. With the aid of a rich self-compiled corpus of recipes (1 million tokens, <12,000 types) we then describe several features of British and American culinary texts, outline major categories of snares lurking for the translator, discuss key characteristics of English-language recipes, and present numerous concrete examples vindicating the brownie points gained through analyses of recipe websites and cookery software in teaching English for specific purposes and specialised translation from the author’s experience of more than a decade.