A family member gave us a package of Hungarian noodles, which [my wife] Hilary and I were studying the other night, with an eye to figuring out how we might eventually prepare them.

On the back of the package was a recipe, in Hungarian.  Though the alphabet is Roman, we found that neither of us could recognize or induce the meaning of a single word--unlike when we see something in, say, Swedish.  And yet the structure of the text was completely familiar. Here was the list of ingredients, and there was the narrative that explained what to do with them.  I realized that this visible recipe with invisible elements was, in effect, a blank map!