Recipes spend most of their time speaking in measurements. Two hundred grams. Twelve minutes. A quarter-inch dice. Then, near the end, they write: salt to taste.
"To taste" is treated as vague advice, the place where instructions give up. I think it is the most exact measurement in the recipe. Salt does not enter an empty system. It meets tomatoes with different amounts of water, broth salted by someone else, cheese at its own stage of age, a sauce that reduced more quickly than expected. The author cannot know the total. The cook has the only instrument that can.
This transfer of authority would feel generous if recipes did not postpone it. After twenty lines telling a beginner exactly what to do, they suddenly demand judgment without admitting that judgment is a skill. "To taste" can feel like abandonment because the recipe waited until the last possible moment to make the reader a cook.
I want the instruction earlier. Taste before it thickens. Taste after the acid. Taste again tomorrow. Not because intuition is mystical, but because flavor is a moving target and attention is one of the ingredients.
Measurements get you close. The final instruction is the first one addressed to the person actually holding the spoon.