The incredible shrinking recipes
- April 24, 2009 3:41 PM |
- By Amber Hildebrandt
by Amber Hildebrandt, CBCNews.ca
Reductions I can handle, but reducing a recipe to a 140-character Tweet seems like a recipe for disaster.
Maureen Evans tweets from a rented castle in Northern Ireland. (Courtesy of Maureen Evans)
But that's exactly what Maureen Evans, 27, of British Columbia does from a rented castle in Northern Ireland, where she lives with Twitter's former lead architect Blaine Cook.
She first began condensing recipes in the fall of 2007. Her Twitter fan base has since expanded to nearly 12,000 and she's been featured in articles such as one last week in the New York Times. As Lawrence Downes notes in his article it's not so much about the practicality of Tweeting recipes but the fun in decoding the extreme abbreviation - and the surprise at each success.
Here's an excerpt of an interview I did with Evans on Twitter. You can find her at www.twitter.com/cookbook.
CBCfoodbytes: First question: tell me about what gave you the idea to tweet recipes?
Cookbook: I wanted to share my love of food with busy friends. Blaine was building Twitter, and it seemed ideal for feeding recipes into busy lives!
CBCfoodbytes: What kind of response have you had from your followers?
Cookbook: Isn't followers an odd word? It's been more like we're at a virtual table: having conversations, swapping ideas. Response has been involved!
CBCfoodbytes: Do you try all your recipes before putting them online? Where do you get the recipes from?
Cookbook: Most are tested; I'm making today's as we tweet. They're old favourites, travel experiences, grandma's cooking and seasonal food from books.
CBCfoodbytes: What kind of comments/ideas do your 'followers' send you?
Cookbook: Recently, kind words; find myself blushing at my computer a lot! But often they're seeking advice, on matters from bumper crops to Diabetes.
CBCfoodbytes: What do you make of all the attention your tweets have received?
Cookbook: I'm awed, and honoured to inspire. I think it shows that although many people feel too busy to cook, slow food remains a subject of passion.
CBCfoodbytes: Tell me about some recipes that have proved difficult or almost impossible to tweet?
Cookbook: Gnocchi: steam/peel/mill lb tater. Knead w .25t salt/10T flour. Scissor fr pastrybag to 2L simmering milk/t salt~m to float. Srv w parm/s+p.
Cookbook: Gnocchi was tough! My goal is always to be clear and concise, so recipes that are ingredient and method heavy are a challenge. I love that.
CBCfoodbytes: How long have you been tweeting recipes? And where do you go from here?
Cookbook: I started with Bread on Oct 25, 07, with 240 recipes since then! I'll keep going, but I'm excited to see people tweeting recipes themselves.
Cookbook: The original purpose is unfolding: busy people are tweeting about food. There's potential for a DIY food community... things are cooking up!
About the Authors
- Elizabeth Bridge is a producer with CBC's Digital Archives project. She got her start in the kitchen baking brownies and making fudge but is still trying to get pastry right.
- Andrea Chiu
is an associate producer at CBC Radio Digital. Though she loves to eat, cook and discuss food,
don't ask her to bake. It never turns out well. She tweets as @TOfoodie on Twitter and organizes food and wine events in Toronto called FoodieMeet.
- Amber Hildebrandt
works for CBCNews.ca in Toronto. Growing up on a farm in Manitoba, she acquired an insatiable appetite, but it was during a stint in Japan that she developed her discerning tastebuds and foodie ways.
- Tara Kimura
is a multimedia producer for CBCNews.ca.
- Andree Lau
is a CBC web reporter in Calgary. Her journalism career includes seven years as a CBC-TV reporter. Her own blog called "are you gonna eat that?" chronicles her eating adventures (including sampling snake and camel hoof tendon).
- Jessica Wong
is a CBCNews.ca writer who loves to eat and cook, as well as discuss, read and watch programming about food, sometimes all at once.
- Kevin Yarr
, CBCNews.ca's writer in Prince Edward Island, wrote about food and beer for national and regional magazines before joining the CBC. He acquired a desire for new tastes on his first trip to Europe, and an appreciation of eating locally and in season when he finally settled down on P.E.I.
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Comments (12)
Maureen's got to get out more - if people are SO busy wouldn't they order in or dine out? Got to be online then why wouldn't people w/ iPhones or Blackberry's just got to a recipe site? Sorry not buying into being a "Twit".
Are you KIDDING ME?
She takes other people's recipes, puts them into shorthand so that they'll fit into Twitter's 120 character limit and does this with the boundless idle time she has because her boyfriend is filthy rich and rents a CASTLE IN IRELAND?
Who the hell picks stories for the CBC? Out of all the interest and skilled people in the world, this is the best you could come up with? A bored, shiftless 20 something living off her boyfriend's money and pissing around with technology in her spare time?
Call me when she actually makes something of import.
I have to disagree with Ricardo. The idea of condensing a recipe into such a small space strikes me as a real intellectual challenge, maybe not a par with composing a sonnet, but along the same lines.
Lots of tweets are crap, of course, but so is lots of everything else. And if you read the interview carefully, you'll see that Maureen shows an economy of expression in her replies that lots of us could use more of.
There is a tweeting, ipod, cellphone,internet
generation that exists today and has sooo much time for all this no wonder they have no clue how to learn something in the kitchen as in "real cooking". Time well spent instead of this
constant checking and texting if you ask me.
Its become silly.
Roxanne: Because if you make one of her recipes, you're not actually cooking for real? Please.
And don't insult an entire generation based on some bizarre unfounded opinion you have about it. Since when are technology and cooking mutually exclusive? Believe it or not, it's possible to have an iPod, cell phone, and the internet and still cook. If anything, having access to a wider variety of recipes, how to videos, and actual interactions with more experienced cooks has made me a better one myself.
You also realize the irony of saying this online in the comments section of a blog about cooking, right? I bet when you learned how to cook, you had to walk barefoot in the snow to the grocery store, uphill both ways.
Please.
Anything to encourage people to cook is a plus. Cooking is a lost art; we need to learn more of it. If twittering makes it easier, then perhaps the books and pages of recipes won't be so intimidating.
However, I see twitter recipes more for intermediate cooks who know their way around a kitchen. It's hard for a beginner to decipher the twitter let alone understand the process that happens when you actually cook.
Lame.
Slow down. Disconnect once in a while. Cooking is a great time to do just that.
How stupid does "Breaker breaker good buddy! What's yer 20?" sound?
Twitter's the CB radio of 2009.
So, my tax dollars paid not only for this "article", but also Maureen's layabout lifestyle of soi-disant "writing and cultural resistance"?
Who do I call to get that money back so that it can go toward something more worthwhile, like, say, some grad student developing vaccines.
I'm the writer of the recipes, so if I may pipe in: I'm not sure what leads people to believe there is only one way to use Internet tools, and that is gluttonously. The Internet is like butter -- of course a predominate diet of it is bad for you, but that fact doesn't preclude having just a little. In fact, a little is great!
And of course, looking at Twitter as a form of expression: of course most of it is silly, but not a significantly higher proportion than is silly in magazines, television, novels, phone calls... For every great book there are innumerable pulp romances. For every intelligent phone conversation there are infinite insipid chats. Does that mean we should give up on books and telephones? I should hope not.
As for the notion that the tiny @cookbook is laying siege to traditional cooking, this seems akin to believing gay marriage is bent on destroying the institution of the family. Don't worry, it's not! I like tiny recipes and long ones -- I use both! Roxanne, you give me too much credit if you think I make the recipes up in my head. I abbreviate them from "real" recipes most of the time, and test all of them out).
And rest assured, Shane and Ricardo, that I revel in the outdoors -- I garden, walk for hours, love deep wilderness camping -- and spend as much time as I can off my computer. I don't even have a cell phone. The fact remains, though, that I'm a writer. The computer is necessarily my primary work tool. Participating in an online community based on offline activity provides five minutes of relaxation in my virtual workspace (yes, that's right -- I'll spend just five minutes a pop on Twitter -- I'm busy with grad school, for Pete's sake) and as well, it reminds me and 12,000 other people of something "real" we love doing.
So... would anyone mind elucidating the down-to-earth benefits of offhand snarks?
Terry, how do you gather that you have paid for my education? It wasn't government funded; I saved up. Of course, I don't write Twitter recipes as schoolwork, either, so your argument is senseless at all levels.
Thank you Maureen for replying to the many who don't get it and who then make snap judgements about you. Granted I don't know you either but I tend to think I would like to, just based on your replies to the "snarks"
Good luck and keep on Tweeting (I don't but at the moment, I just might start!)