Thanks Les, but let?s keep the cat well away from the pigeon coup and tucked up nice and comfy out of harm?s way.
On topic: Thanks for the link, Merrybaker. I was looking for one too and found this:
http://allrecipes.com/hints/scaling.aspThis includes the lines:
?Whenever you alter the amounts of ingredients for a given recipe, you may also need to adjust the cooking temperature, cooking time, pan size and seasonings.?
And:
?If you are doubling a recipe, expect to use only about 1 ? times the original amount of seasonings. If you are tripling a recipe, expect to use only about twice the original amount of seasonings. If you are dividing a recipe in half or to one-third, then use a little less than half or a third of the original amount of seasonings.?
Though whether it goes on to say that a fried breakfast of fried eggs, streaky bacon, white toast with butter, and whole milk is healthy, I can?t say!
Slightly off topic: People on this site have been given recipes and demonstrations from BIR chefs. We?ve tried them at home and a lot of us have remarked that though nice, they?re not the same as the real thing. So somewhere, there?s a gap between what we?ve been shown or told and what we can produce.
We can try and fill this gap with further research (those of us that have the knack of getting into BIR kitchens ? I don?t!), with experimentation and refinement of ingredients and techniques, or even with guesswork. Or, like hundreds of members of this site, we can sit back and hope someone else cracks it and posts the magic answer (and there?s nothing wrong with that).
If you cook 10 pots of curry and then add them together I agree they?ll taste the same as they did individually. And, like George and Yellowfingers, I would have thought that if you add 10 times the ingredients to a pot and then cook them, the result would be the same. Until Merrybaker made her post. And then I thought: ?
How do I know for sure that the chemical reaction in foodstuffs caused by the application of heat remains constant regardless of mass??
Alright, I didn?t. :
I thought: ?
One and a half times the salt? That?s interesting?. I know precious little about food chemistry (and don?t particularly want to know more than I have to!).
The links certainly suggest, just like Merrybaker?s Home Economics teacher, that the effect of salt and seasoning doesn?t necessarily remain constant. Whether the spices we use ? and the way we use them, in the processes of tarka and bhuna ? come under the heading of ?spices and seasonings? in the author?s mind well, once again, I?m not sure. But having read the info, can we still say it's
incontravertible that all ingredients should be scaled up in direct proportion?
BIR chefs have said that quantities make a difference. Darthy?s found more consistent and reliable results cooking in bulk. I agree that evaporation would be the major factor. I don?t know that it?s the only one.
If I get into a conversation with someone and we?re kicking these ideas around, it doesn?t help to be told that we?re incontrovertibly wrong, that we urgently need basic science lessons, and that we?re displaying a lack of basic commonsense. Nothing personal, Yellowfingers, I agree ? it?s just that kind of language can create bad feeling and stifle debate, and therefore the flow of information.
Interesting that my guess about adding more than half the amount of salt & spices when halving the recipe is the exact opposite of what the author suggests in the quote above!
Ian
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Others claim there are no grounds whatsoever for doing this. 
