Slashfood recently drew my attention to a food blog oddity: a Twitter cookbook.
For those unfamiliar, Twitter is a sort of micro-blogging (or some might say hyper-blogging): each post has a 140 character limit, and many people post multiple times per day. I’ve been resistant to joining Twitter or even following friends who use it, mostly because it seems to promote hyper connectedness, and I’m already more than connected enough. I can’t even keep up with all the blogs I like. But it’s the cutting edge right now, and people are using it in some neat ways.
The Twitter cookbook gives you recipes in 140 characters or less. It does it by condensing them: using shorthand, cutting out unnecessary steps, lots of abbreviations. For example, a recent cake recipe:
Midnight Cake: beat in step 2egg/c sug/8T oil&cocoa&milk/T triplesec&lemon&orangezest; +2c flour/t bkgsoda&pdr/.5t salt&cinn; 30m@350F/175C.
I think I could follow these recipes, though I’d have to read them 10 times over and maybe transcribe them just to satisfy myself I wasn’t skipping anything. And some of the dishes sound quite interesting. I like the concept of shooting out a lot of recipe concepts to see what sticks – though some of them sound unique enough that I’d like to see a full blog post and photo accompanying them. The biggest challenge for me is that it’s hard to get a sense of the finished product from reading the recipe: what’s it supposed to look like? Did I do it right? These tidbits are useful even for experienced chefs.
And more than that, I like reading recipes. Sometimes I’ll take out the Moosewood cookbook and just read through it, because everything is described so poetically. Food is a poetic undertaking (or it should be), and I wonder if that could be another approach to a twittered recipe collection. How about the haiku of recipes, instead of the scientific reduction?
I’m reminded of Mark Bittman’s occassional “100 Recipes” articles in his Minimalist column, where he shares a large number of recipes by painting them in broad strokes, letting you imagine the outcome but not prescribing quantities. That approach gives a lot of leeway for experimentation (and if you read this blog regularly, you know I’m all about experimentation).
For example, Bittman recently wrote 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics:
TOMATOES AND PEACHES Toss together sliced seeded tomatoes and peaches, along with thinly sliced red onion and chopped cilantro or rosemary. Dress at the last minute with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
… and that’s almost short enough for Twitter. (I see his mini-recipes at about 200 characters, on average.) And you can almost taste the tomatoes.
So what do you think? Can you put a decent recipe on Twitter? What’s the best way to get it across? Are other people already doing this, and I just don’t know about them?