I'm writing some software and could use some help (from some experts!) naming something. In cooking, culinary arts, etc. I have to imagine that there exists a concept where you, the chef, have a master "cook plan" for how you will execute a particular course, meal, set of servings, etc.
Meaning, you know what you want to cook for a particular meal: you know the ingredients, the recipes for each component of the meal, the timing of when you need to start prepping, cooking and plating each component, etc. A master plan. A "cook plan" for the entire theatre of operations so to speak.
This cannot simply just be a "recipe", as to me, a "recipe" is a sub-component of this plan as it takes ingredients in as input, processes those ingredients and produces (as output) just one component of a meal.
I'm talking one step above an individual recipe: a plan that covers everything you will do to produce all the courses of a large meal.
Is there a word for this in the culinary world?
Best Answer
No, there isn't such a word.
How planning is done
Such a word doesn't exist, and neither does the "master plan" you are envisioning. What exists instead is a menu, plus recipes, plus conventions or ad-hoc decisions.
First think of a situation where a caterer works for a big event, there is the need to orchestrate many people preparing, cooking and serving. These people are all professionals, and don't really need much information to get their jobs done.
Other situations will involve people who are not seasoned professionals and thus don't have all the implicit knowledge, but these situatins also usually tend to be less formal, involve less cooking (fewer dishes, fewer guests, more parts such as bread being bought instead of made on the spot), and there are fewer people doing the cooking and serving, so less need to orchestrate a team. All three factors reduce the need of explicit planning. At the "easy" end of the whole thing is somebody throwing together a weekday dinner going with whatever is in the fridge, starting without a plan and making decisions while cooking. In the intermediate stages, e.g. 2-3 housewives from an extended family preparing a festive meal for a family celebration, people may do more explicit planning, but then they will also use some variation of the items listed above for the formal catering situation.
Even when these items (menu, recipes, shopping list, prep plan) are explicitely written down, nobody perceives the combination of them as one cohesive "thing", so it doesn't have a name.
Your information architecture
You give very little information about what your app is supposed to do, so I cannot give more than the most general advice. If you really need a single "entry point" for the cook/caterer, it probably have to be the menu. Since all other planning items depend on the menu (OK, the recipes don't strictly follow the menu, but the selection out of the pool of possible recipes does), it does have a bit of a "root of all things" role. So you could give the menu a more prominent role in the UI and have the user first visit the menu and from there navigate to each recipe, and possibly have the shopping list for the menu and the prep plan for the menu. Another option is to call the unifying concept an "event" and have the menu, the shopping list and the prep plan belong to the event entity, and link the recipes from the menu. I am pretty sure both will be intuitive for somebody organizing the cooking for an event.
Be sure to know that your users need these items before you invest the resources in programming them. The ability to jot down a menu will be central, but users may not care to enter a recipe for each menu item, since for many items, they are accustomed to doing them from either implicit knowledge or some existing storage system like a cherished grandma's dead-tree notebook. If the recipes are available, it can be useful to calculate a shopping list out of them, but make sure that you can deal properly with different units and with ad-hoc changes the user is making for the event ("this time, I want to make my aunt's panna cotta with strawberries instead of blueberries"). A space to enter an optional prep plan may be used under some circumstances, but find out from your users if they care for it. If they do, don't try to calculate it from information in the recipes, there are many implicit dependencies you won't be able to really place into your software. Just give them the blank space or maybe some minimal structure like time slots.