Recipes that Scale

I was reading Paul Graham's essay about Ramen Profitability and what caught my attention the most was this footnote. It is a recipe for rice and beans, which is apparently healthier than ramen noodles (I am entertained by the fact that Paul feels enough responsibility for his aspiring web entrepreneur audience to go to the trouble of making sure they eat right, but that's not what this is about).

The interesting thing about this recipe is that it is for 2n people and the ingredients are listed throughout in terms of n. This seems like a particularly elegant way of specifying a recipe. I like to experiment with recipes I find on the web quite a bit, but more often than not it is a recipe that "serves 6" or some similarly useless number for a singleton chef such as myself. So I try the recipe anyway, but first I have to adjust the ingredient list accordingly. It's a simple thing, but expressing the recipe in terms of n makes it easier, in my mind at least, to adapt a recipe. I wish all recipe writers would make their recipes generic and scalable like this.