My wife keeps more than two dozen cookbooks in our kitchen, giving her access to the collected culinary wisdom of Martha Stewart, Molly O’Neill, the staff of Better Homes & Gardens, and a variety of other gastronomic gurus.
But the cranberry sauce recipe she chose for Thanksgiving this year comes from an anonymous online source whom she knows only as “Leeza.”
Like many amateur chefs, my wife nowadays is more likely to seek out meal ideas from her iPad than her cookbooks. And typically, she relies on popular websites like Allrecipes.com or Food.com which allow her fellow home chefs to submit recipes — as well as review, comment on, and even alter those submitted by others.
The sites — which combine elements of crowdsourcing, social media, and an old-fashioned recipe swap — are popular destinations on the Web. Allrecipes.com, a subsidiary of Reader’s Digest, claims more than 20 million unique monthly visitors. Scripps Networks says its Food.com has about four million. Other sites that feature user-submitted recipes, such as Cooks.com and the Recipe Wiki on Wikia.com, also attract millions of visitors each month and feature a gluttonous variety of menu choices. (Leeza’s is but one of more than 300 cranberry sauce options on Allrecipes.com.)
“I know people who tell me they’re giving away their cookbooks and they’re relying only on online recipes,” said food historian and author Barbara Haber. “It shocks me when I hear people are just tossing them out as if they were old telephone books.”
To the extent that Haber’s acquaintances are eschewing traditional cookbooks for user-submitted recipe websites, they represent a cultural shift in American’s kitchens — harkening back to the era before the mid 1800’s when recipes often were handed down from mother to daughter or passed around among neighbors. That kind of recipe sharing largely was replaced as families moved off the farm, and commercially published cookbooks became popular. By the 1940’s and 1950’s, the Betty Crocker and Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks rivaled the Bible in total sales.
Now, the Internet threatens to diminish the role of “expert” cookbook authors and bring recipe sharing back in vogue — albeit in a more impersonal fashion.
“The community of recipe sharers that was once limited to women of a particular social circle in a particular town now includes perfect strangers from all over the world,” said Queensborough Community College professor Megan Elias, who’s writing her third book on America’s culinary history.
“The Internet is a great vehicle for the democratization of kitchen wisdom, as for lots of other kinds of wisdom,” she said by email.
Too many cooks … make a recipe better?
Indeed, the popularity of post-it-yourself recipes mirrors that of other types of online crowdsourcing. Sites such as TripAdvisor.com, which allow users to review hotels and restaurants, lessen travelers’ reliance on expert sources like the AAA Tourbooks. Customers’ product reviews on shopping sites diminish the need to consult a source like Consumer Reports. And, of course, newspapers and other traditional journalistic organizations face competition from dozens of prominent websites, blogs, and social networks where users report, share, and comment on the news.
“People want the security of knowing that what they’re going to do, like make a dinner, is going to be done right … and in the past they did that by following a single expert,” said David Bratvold, the founder of Dailycrowdsource.com. “Nowadays, you can go with the crowd, and people think it’s smarter to go with what the majority of people say.”
It’s hard to deny that using online recipe sites can be more convenient than thumbing through cookbooks. A Food.com search for even an obscure dish like “rabbit stew” yields 21 results, many featuring photos and user comments. (“I cooked a wild rabbit caught this morning, so I simmered for about 2 hours, as wild bunnies tend to be a little tougher than domestic ones.”) The search takes only a few seconds and — in another key distinction from regular cookbooks — costs nothing.
But while even publishers of traditional cookbooks are putting their professionally-designed recipes online, sites that feature contributions from amateur chefs seem to hold unique appeal for many users. Some cooks are especially attracted to the social media aspects of the sites — the ability to comment on, rate, and change other people’s recipes. In recent months, for instance, Wikia users removed the poppy seeds from a strudel and substituted butter for margarine in carrot spice cookies.
“I think the process improves the final product,” said Bruce Shaw of Harvard Common Press, a Boston company that publishes cookbooks and aggregates both professional and amateur recipes through the website Yummly.com. “If you’ve got a hundred people changing a recipe, at some point even if it’s a crappy recipe, it may turn out to be a good recipe because enough people have made it and altered it.”
A role for both professional and crowdsourced recipes
Haber, the food historian, is skeptical about that theory and worries that amateur recipes put cooks “at the mercy of the great unknown.”
“I wouldn’t trust them necessarily,” Haber said in a phone interview. “The good cookbooks have test kitchens and whole staffs of people whose job it is to go over and over the recipes.”
Still, notwithstanding Haber’s friends who’ve trashed their cookbook collections, the genre is far from dead. Last year, cookbook sales modestly increased, with much of the growth coming from books that feature specialty foods or celebrity authors. And Shaw is optimistic that professionally published cookbooks (or their companion websites, apps, and e-books) can coexist with the user-driven recipe sharing sites.
“People who really care deeply about being a good cook and making good food are always going to care about curated content,” Shaw said of the traditional cookbooks with tested recipes that still account for the vast majority of his company’s revenue.
But Shaw sees a role as well for the online crowdsourced recipes – which some people might say are adequately curated by the masses who try them and bestow upon them such descriptions as “absolutely delicious,” “too eggy,” or “My family of seven literally gagged on it.”
“I think there are a heck of a lot of people who come home every night and have three kids and all they want to do is put dinner on the table,” Shaw said. “People who cook on a regular basis get the distinction.”
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