Assisting culinary activities for inexperienced users has been considered as an important task in most existing works in the field. On the other hand, recipe texts are becoming available on the Internet in increasing numbers. However, they tend to be written simply by mostly non-professional people, and thus are sometimes difficult for an inexperienced person to follow the steps and manage to cook as they are supposed to. In this paper, we propose a method that detects difficult descriptions for an inexperienced user in an existing text recipe, and supplements them with multimedia contents including text information extracted from a large number of recipes, and also images and video clips on certain kinds of cooking operations, to facilitate the understanding of the recipe. Experimental results showed promising ability of the proposed method to assist inexperienced users understand the descriptions in a recipe. © 2010 IEEE.