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adderbolt - Jack posted an update Thursday, Sep 29, 2011, 11:20pm EDT, 14 years, 1 month ago
Technology changes the once simple cookbook
With a box full of carrots and a hankering for something vaguely exotic, Mary-Claire van Leunen turned to her computer for a recipe. "I looked for 'Turkish carrots' and I found it easily, in fact I found half a dozen." Everyone's fired up a search engine to deal with that mound of parsley or a bumper crop of cucumbers. But van Leunen wasn't randomly appealing to the online universe. She was searching the recipes in her own cookbooks, the roughly 2,000 volumes that line her shelves. Without ever cracking a single spine.
"In the past, I would have gone to the Central Asian section of my books and gone through the indexes," says van Leunen. "I would have looked in two or three cookbooks, and wound up adapting something for fennel or something to the carrots."
Today, the online cookbook indexing service called Eat Your Books lets her instantly search the index of nearly every cookbook she owns. When she finds the recipe she wants, the website tells her the book it's in. It's part of a new wave of digital tools that are changing the way home cooks explore new recipes, revisit old ones and create satisfying meals.
Eat Your Books, launched nine months ago, boasts a library of 88,000 books with more than 2,000 indexed volumes. Users just tell the site which cookbooks they own, then they can quickly peruse the recipes of the chefs and authors they already trust. Likewise, the website Cookstr [www.cookstr.com/] catalogues recipes from more than 500 chefs and cookbook authors and offers them to users — free of charge. And mobile applications and e-books, once little more than digitized versions of cookbook content, have begun adding features that make the experience interactive and highly personal.
"It is completely feasible today that a mobile device will be the center of the connected kitchen and Cookstr wants to be at the center of that connected kitchen," says Cookstr chief executive officer Art Chang. Cookstr offers roughly 8,000 recipes from 16 major cookbook publishers, each of them sifted by a team of food-savvy "curators" who categorize them by variables such as ingredient, nutritional information, even taste and texture. Want a chicken dish that's spicy, requires only one pot and has fewer than 500 calories per serving? Cookstr offers up 16 recipes, including West African chicken stew and a Thai green curry………. Yadayadayada … Long Article about “digital” cooking
