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Cooking with the Internet?

Posted by Cliff on from the your-browser-as-a-cookbook dept.

VonGuard asks: "Not all of you live on ramen and coffee. At some point, you have to cook, and the Internet should be a great place to find recipes. Is there a Google for recipes. And why isn't there a larger open cookbook on the net? So, is anyone working on this, or is there something the rest of us don't know about yet?"

21 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. icbdb by Bai+jie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What would really be great is an Internet Cook Book Database. Set up to model after IMDB of course.

  2. Sounds like a job for a Wiki by Saven+Marek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No such thing as too many cooks spoil the broth, I think. A wiki would be the perfect solution for this, as long as the interest is there.

    I'm thankful I learned how to cook and cook well when I was younger, but there is ALWAYS something to learn from someone else. It's not some exact science or mysterious voodoo, just something anyone with a little creativity and some basic knowledge can build on.

    PS. Experiment most when you're single :-). it's easier that way when you screw up, and is a whole lot easier than when you're partnered later!.

    Classic Celebrity Desktops & Movie Posters

  3. Decent Curry by Basehart · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As you all know there are millions of recipes out there, but try finding one single recipe for a decent curry, the kind you can get at your favorite indian restaurant, and I bet you can't.

    Sure, most come close, but even playing indian new age music while sitting down to eat your creation just doesn't cut it!

    So what's the secret?

  4. For the adventurous... by mopslik · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...there's always Epicurious.

    I've found many a tasty recipe on there, but then, I love cooking and don't mind buying some wacky ingredients or spending extra time whipping something up.

  5. Here's a classic. by Maskirovka · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Ars Technica batchelor chow cookbook.

  6. Also, IP doesn't protect recepies by braddock · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Recipes can't be patented, and the data of a list of ingredients and a procedure can't be copyrighted.

    That means that if someone wrote a proper web-crawling recipe snarfer that stored the recipes in a database (without stealing the formatting or stealing a particular collection), it should be intellectual property free and fully public domain!

    Definitely a good weekend hacker challenge....

    Braddock Gaskill

    1. Re:Also, IP doesn't protect recepies by braddock · · Score: 2, Interesting

      IANAL, but a recipe book is protected as an arrangement of recipies, and as pointed out a non-trivial detailed text description (like, a paragraph) of how to make the item WOULD be copyrighted. The layout and presentation would also be covered under copyright. The procedure (a "recipe") itself is not.

      To be kosher (no pun intended), your web-crawler needs to seperate out the ingrediants and the procedure into an objective form that doesn't steal the original description. "BAKE 20 minutes on 250 degrees" and "Add lemon" aren't copyrightable fragments. It's like extracting the physics from a physics textbook. The textbook is copyrighted, but the physics aren't.

      This is why, as pointed out, there are "secret recipes"....recipes are typically covered under trade secret laws. If its a well kept secret, the "owner" can contract or license the secret to someone else in exchange for them not revealing the secret, like an NDA. The owner is afforded certain protections from that contract and trade secret laws. But a published recipe is not a trade secret.

      Braddock Gaskill

  7. Don't learn coding from your microwave... by kimago · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ...and don't learn cooking from the unmediated slop on the Web.

    Drop $15 bucks on a copy of The New Basics Cookbook (including how to equip your kitchen, cooking glossary etc.) Browse through it. Drool. Pick one of its wonderful recipes. Unplug. Put on your favorite CD, loud.

    Then spend an hour in the kitchen indulging your programmer process-queen, only this time you're rewarding your senses instead of your mind. For geeks who've never cooked, I promise you it can be a revelation. It's like coding - you plan, assemble, research, learn, follow instructions, improvise, iterate, performance-tune, test, and launch. Only "launch" = "eat something so delicious you'd never believe you were capable of making it yourself".

  8. An interesting recipe finder by Gogl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "What's for dinner?": you tell it what ingredients you have, what ingredients to exclude, and it'll tell you what you can make. Handy if you're trying to cook something with what you have and don't have time to go to the store or somesuch.

  9. Bea's Kitchen by whirlycott · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My wife started a French cooking website with about 70 recipes on it already, all of which she has written herself based on her experiences growing up in France and living in the south pacific.

  10. Google Recipe Search by J.+Matthew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Try Google Recipe Search, it has Amazingly Powerful Parameters!

  11. TastyWiki by MisterBad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The TastyWiki is a Wiki recipe site.

    --
    Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
  12. No special interface needed... by CarolinaCracker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I use the regular google interface to find recipes all the time... try Green Chili Stew, or Southern Cornbread, etc. you'll get links to most of the websites listed so far plus a few "outliers" that can really be the "better" recipe.

  13. XML for cooks by aprentic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I once formated an ingredient list in pseudo XML as a joke. That got me thinking. Is there an XML cooking spec? Or some cooking programming language?

    It should be fairly easy to design, and it would probably be nice to have cooking instructions standardized.

    1. Re:XML for cooks by The+Troll+Catcher · · Score: 2, Interesting

      http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/

      It seems like a pretty well-designed spec - I used it for a program I wrote a while back (KDE Cookbook).

    2. Re:XML for cooks by DerekLyons · · Score: 2, Interesting
      It seems like a pretty well-designed spec - I used it for a program I wrote a while back (KDE Cookbook).
      It looks cool and geekish, but utterly ignores the fact that there is *already* a fairly well understood format and syntax for writing recipies. (Most any decent book on writing cookbooks will discuss these.) For example, there is a difference between 4 cups of tomatoes, chopped and 4 cups of chopped tomatoes, yet anyone familiar with the syntax will see this instantly.

      In addition to this basic style, there is also the style used by the Joy, which is a derivation of pure-text style used from the Middle Ages down to about the 1960's. (The style died as folks ceased to learn cooking 'at their mothers knee', and instead desired 'precise' recipies.)

      The 'precision' style used today, and exemplified by the 'spec' you reference is exactly why so many people have trouble learning to cook. Because the recipe is 'precise' (cook at 350F for 35 minutes) people assume that a failure in a dish comes from them, rather than from natural variations in food qualities and equipment performance. Or to put it in geekspeak, cooking is analog, not digital.

  14. Re:RecipeML by hInstance · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I was considering this for a website I worked on, but the license agreement for RecipeML put me off:
    Mention that your site/software uses RecipeML by name.
    (If it is software, you need to get permission first.)
    Not that it's all that restrictive, but sheesh, it's a markup language. The value comes from having as many people use it as possible. The license makes me suspect they're trying to make a buck somehow, which I view as putting the brakes on making it ubiquitous.

    This site powered by HTML!
  15. alt.gourmand by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 2, Interesting
    google for alt.gourmand. It began as net.recipies back in the '80s by Brian Reid who was very serious about his recipies... (the now infamous alt.* heirarcy was created, in part, because he thought that 'rec.food.recipes' denigrated his moderated newsgroup (I vaguely remember him lobbying to have it put int the soc(social) heirarchy. When I printed it (back in 1991, it was about 500+pages of recipies (one page/recipe). Back then it was done as a set of nroff/troff macros which (among other things) allowed you to specify whether you wanted metric or english measurments. and even allowed a permuted index (for those of you used to the old UNIX manual page books).

    Some very nice recipies there, and a number of versions of some of the more popular ones.

    The archive at http://www.funet.fi/pub/culture/recipes/ has about 700 recipes others may have more.
    Each recipe has a rating for difficulty, time and precision needed.

    --
    Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  16. Re:Seriously? by forkazoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Another show that deserves mention is America's Test Kitchen on PBS. They try a few combinations to see what works best. It's like nutritive hacking.

    On one show, they made brownies, and showed the results of several variations. (Extra egg makes it taste bad -- add this much flour to give a nice shiny top -- and more of this to make it cakey instead of dense...)

    On another, they did pasta dishes, and explained the etymology of the Italian word Putresca in Pasta Putresca. They also explained the chemistry behind cooking good pasta (At least two quarts water, so that the starch molecules are sufficiently diluted that they don't stick together while in solution)

    Also, the chicks are hot.

  17. What's in your fridge? by gborland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    BBC web site. Type in whatever you have in the fridge, and it gives you matching recipes. :-)

  18. Re:One suggestion... by Saltation · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Depends on the food being cooked and how stupidly you cook it. Heat breaks down vitamins, true; but it also breaks down the compounds and chemical bonds which lock the vitamins and minerals away from easy digestion. It's a bit of a race condition as regards to where you catch the trade-off of increased digestibility versus less left to digest. And it varies by food too, for example potatoes tend to just keep on increasing in digestible vitamin content the longer you cook them, but the higher their glycaemic index grows too...
    Humans' digestion systems most closely matches that of scavengers, and you'll note that a great many delicacies and "ideal" cooking or food preparation techniques essentially involve food rotting, commencing a breakdown of chemical bonds. Examples: blue cheese, meat hung for a week, old wine. Heat proxies this process.

    Having said that: culturally, most people seem to boil the bum out of everything, so compared to that, raw food is a vast improvement.

    --
    Sal

    Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
    Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com