A Recipe: Infinitive and Impersonal Instructions

A recipe is the purest sample of instructional Hebrew you can find: a page of pure command, none of it addressed to anybody. Hebrew writes it in two conventions, and the interesting thing is that a learner is usually taught only one of them. This page gives an original short cake recipe — written for this page, not taken from any Israeli site or cookbook — in the bare infinitive, and then shows the same steps in the impersonal present plural, which is what you will actually meet most often online.

The ingredients

An ingredient line is a measure phrase: a container word plus what goes in it, with no preposition between them. כוס קמח is "a cup of flour" — the of is invisible, because the two nouns form a smichut pair. That is why nothing here says של.

The numerals are where an English speaker slips. כוס, כפית and כף are all feminine, so they take feminine numerals — and Hebrew marks the feminine on 3–19 with the bare form, not with the ־ָה ending. Hence שלוש ביצים, שתי כוסות, שתי כפיות. The ־ָה-suffixed forms (שלושה, ארבעה) are the masculine ones, and two is its own pair — שני and שתי — outside the 3–19 rule. The marking looks inverted and is; the numeral itself agrees perfectly normally. Details on שני and שתי and measures.

Note also the two ways of saying "one": כוס אחת, with אחת after the noun, and plain כפית with no numeral at all. Both mean one; אחת is added only when the quantity matters. And "half" is the bare noun חצי in a straight smichut — חצי כוס, never anything with של.

The instructions, in the infinitive

Nine steps, every verb in them an infinitive, and not one word telling anybody to do anything. That is the point: an infinitive carries no person, no gender and no number, so a recipe written this way works for whoever picks it up. Hebrew uses the same device on public notices — see the infinitive as a command and reading Israeli signs — and the forms themselves are built on the infinitive.

Three details in those nine lines are worth pulling out.

את on every definite object. לחמם את התנור, לטרוף את הביצים, ליצוק את הבלילה. In the ingredient list none of these nouns had an article and none took את; in the instructions they are all definite, so they all do. When the object stays indefinite the marker vanishes again: לערבב קמח in step 2, לפזר אבקת סוכר in step 9. See את.

The maqaf before a numeral. ל־180 uses מקף ־ (U+05BE), Hebrew's own hyphen, which sits high on the line rather than in the middle. It joins a one-letter prefix to a figure, and an ASCII hyphen in its place is a spelling error, not a font choice. More on מקף.

עד ש and במשך. "Until" before a clause is עד ש־: עד שהתערובת בהירה, עד שקיסם יוצא יבש. Before a bare noun it is plain עד — עד הבוקר. Duration is במשך plus the time — במשך 40 דקות — which answers how long, as against ב־40 דקות, which would mean within 40 minutes.

The other convention: מחממים, מערבבים, מוסיפים

Israeli recipes are just as often written in the impersonal present plural — the masculine plural participle with no subject, meaning roughly "one heats", "you mix".

Which convention actually dominates? Eight Israeli food pages were checked for this page on 15 August 2026 — ynet, Happy Kitchen, foody, 10dakot, eati, The Kitchen Coach, oogio and one personal food blog — two of them read line by line. Counting verbs across a whole page turns out to measure the wrong thing: a recipe page is mostly prose around the recipe, and the infinitives in that prose overwhelmingly belong to a modal (אפשר ל…, יש ל…, מומלץ ל…, כדאי ל…, ניתן ל…) rather than opening a step. What settles it is the steps themselves — on both pages read line by line, every numbered preparation step opened with the present plural, and only one of the eight, the personal blog, was written in the infinitive throughout.

So: both conventions are fully current, the present plural is the safer default for Israeli online food writing, and no site mixes them at random — each writer picks one and keeps it for the whole recipe. That last point is the practical one.

Why not the imperative?

Hebrew has a perfectly good imperative, and recipes almost never use it.

That is the problem. The Hebrew imperative has to choose: ערבב to a man, ערבבי to a woman, ערבבו to a group. A cookbook does not know who is holding it, and picking the masculine singular by default reads today either as dated or as an instruction being barked. Both other conventions dodge the choice, which is precisely why Israeli food writing settled on them. Where a writer does turn to the reader — in an aside outside the numbered steps — the address that appears is the ordinary 2nd-person future (תנסו, תאמינו לי), not the true imperative.

Common Mistakes

1. Masculine numerals on feminine measure words. ביצה, כוס, כפית and כף are all feminine, and 3–19 mark the feminine with the bare form.

2. Dropping את once the subject is gone. Removing the person does not remove the object marker.

3. "Until" without ש before a clause. עד takes a noun directly, but it cannot take a clause on its own.

4. Translating "half of a cup" word for word. Hebrew's fractions attach straight to the measure word, with nothing between them.

Key Takeaways

• Israeli recipes are written in two conventions: the bare infinitive (לחמם, לערבב) and the impersonal present plural (מחממים, מערבבים). Both are fully current; on eight Israeli food pages checked in August 2026, every numbered step on the two pages read line by line opened with the present plural, and only one site of the eight ran on the infinitive.
• Neither convention addresses anybody, and that is the design. The imperative would force a choice between ערבב, ערבבי and ערבבו, and a recipe cannot know which.
• A writer picks one convention and keeps it for the whole recipe. Mixing them mid-list is the tell of a bad translation.
• An ingredient line is a smichut measure phrase with no של: כוס קמח, חצי כפית מלח.
• כוס, כפית and כף are feminine, so the numeral takes the bare form — שתי כוסות, שלוש כפיות — because 3–19 mark the feminine by not carrying ־ָה.
• את appears on every definite object in the steps and on none of the indefinite ones in the list. The maqaf ־ joins a prefix to a figure: ל־180.
• עד ש־ before a clause, plain עד before a noun; במשך for how long something lasts.