Grammar question: substitute A for B

[Theoretician]

If a national newspaper editor told you to substitute A for B in a recipe that you've not yet seen, would you expect the original recipe to contain

a) A
b) B
c) could be either

www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/substitute

This is quite helpful in describing different ways in which "substitute" (confusingly) is used.

Yes I agree, under!I mentioned you need really to know both. But I guess in my example of chicken and pork you would work out that the chicken would be for the pork ie substitute a meat for meat, chicken instead of the pork. It depends on how straight forward the recipe is, whether it has a lot of ingredients or not.

And similarly

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/substitute

B is right.

Substituting A for B is using A in place of B so B is the original.

Substituting A with B means using B instead of A so in that case A would be the original.

ThickAndThin, you said:-

If you are using chicken for pork then you are using chicken.

Yes, but the question was what are you not using, so the answer is pork, i.e. B.

You understand the grammar correctly, but you forgot what the question was.

An example from the oxford dictionary link someone posted

A person or thing acting or serving in place of another:
soya milk is used as a substitute for dairy milk

In this case "soya milk" is A and "dairy milk" is B, A is the substitute and B is the thing being replaced, i.e. B is correct.

Of course it's B. 'Of' and 'with' are important words that give sense to the sentence.

I would say A

The wording is 'substituting A for B' therefore A is being 'substituted' by B

Haha. 'For' and 'with' obvs.....

B

Actually it's pretty worrying how many people are disagreeing. Could this be how knifing incidents occur? With people misunderstanding plain English?

B.

Definitely B. Thickandthin's example of substituting chicken for pork is perfect, she just didn't use her reading skills to understand the question correctly.

Substituting eggs for plant protein also led to a 19 per cent reduction in death risk. I'm more intrigued by the ability of anything to reduce the risk of death by 19% - I thought it was a 100% risk for us all

From the other dictionary link just posted:-

In the phrase "substitute X for Y", to use X in place of Y.

Replacing with the symbols used in this thread, just to make that really clear, it would then say:-

In the phrase "substitute A for B", to use A in place of B.

So B is the original.

Come on people, how am I going to sleep tonight if someone on the internet is wrong?

OP - do we know what both A and B are then?

I asume from your op that we are guessing one of the ingredients. In which case we have to know A in order to buy it from the millions of products in the suoermarket. If we know A then we can eliminate an ingredient from the miniscule (in comparison) list of ingredients.

B

OP's analysis is completely correct.

I read that and had the same reaction op.

If we know what A and B are then I'm changing to B.

I assumed we didn't.

Reading the last update I'm going with B now.

Is there going to be a definitive answer OP?!

Thickandthin what are you on about? Both A and B are known, the question is which is being substituted for which, ie which one was in the original recipe. In your example of chicken for pork, that would be pork, ie B. OP has since posted the original article which absurdly suggests substituting eggs for plant protein. (Although I much prefer eggs...)

Ahhhhh I didn't read the full question either!
B B B B B B
B is the original ingredient!

Can I make it clear that I know that it is B in the original recipe which is being replaced.

But if you had to know just one of them - which is what I thought we were doing - it has to be A.

Cross post, but I still don't get why you thought that - OP was quite clear.

It's not a logic question, it's a grammar question! Doesn't matter whether we know what A or B are! The question was which is the original item?!!!