If I follow you correctly, you want to read in the raw text, xml tag the components and print it back out?

You have a fairly loose 'format', but if it looks like the example you posted, maybe there are a few workarounds:

use strict;
use warnings;

## buffer for holding each Recipe
my @buffer;

## read data
while(<DATA>){
    if (m/^\d+\.\U.+\E$/){
        ## begins with a number and is in all upper case
        ## must be a title, so process what we already have
        process_buffer(\@buffer);
        ## reset buffer
        @buffer = ($_,);
    }
    else {
        push @buffer, $_;
    }
}
## don't miss the last one!
process_buffer(\@buffer);

### SUBS ###

sub process_buffer{
    ## collect buffer
    my @buffer = @{$_[0]};
    ## need at least two lines...
    return 0 unless (scalar@buffer > 1);
    ## process it
    ...
    
}
__DATA__
1.TITLE OF FIRST RECIPE

abstract

Recipe 1.
Recipe 2.
Recipe ...

Procedure...
[download]

I'll leave it up to you how to further break down the sections, but hopefully this is a start.

Are you familiar with the various XML handling modules on CPAN? : XML (I am no expert, but XML::Twig seems popular here, but XML::Quick looks useful for you).

If you want more help on regexes, check out the perldoc tutorials : perlretut

Hope this helps, keep us posted on your progress!