The New York Times Makes 17k Recipes Available Online | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times Makes 17k Recipes Available Online

openculture.com

224 pointsedward94 comments

Needs community tagging of recipes. The recipe of the day is vegan and vegetarian, but has neither tag (both of which already exist: http://cooking.nytimes.com/tag/vegan). No doubt this problem exists for other tags and other recipies in the database.

Edit: A cursory search through the BBC's recipe database shows their tags to be notably more thorough, though at times mistaken (butter labeled vegan in http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/sugar_and_spice_67172) and unfortunately just as immutable at the NYT site.

They also have great write-up detailing their use of CRFs to extract structured data from recipes.

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structur...

I've often thought recipes could benefit from a more structured representation. One idea I had was to recursively define a recipe as either:

A) a raw ingredient

B) a procedure (measurement [4 cups, 2 stalks, 3 pinches], reduction [slicing, dicing, julienne], combination [folding, mixing, blending], heating [sautee, fry, bake, roast]) on one or more recipes

It would be interesting to compare the resulting recipe "trees" across region, cuisine, chef, etc.

There have been attempts, RecipeML comes to mind.

Edit for grammar.

I would prefer a service that signs up with major grocery stores to have every receipt emailed to my "recipe as a service" API where it is associated with my personal loyalty card ID, such that whenever I buy anything from, say, Safeway, I get a list of recipes that can be made from the known inventory in my home.

Make the delivery of "what was bought" to the RaaS completely automatic and transparent.

And the 'reverse' - Plan a week of meals from recipes, and the grocery list is generated. Better, have the list items collected, packed, and ready for pickup at the store.

I think this is what the upvote button is for ;-)

My wife and I have been working on our own startup: https://www.land-of-nosh.com/.

You can plan a week of meals and generate the grocery list (among other things). I (and especially my wife) look forward to the day I can integrate with grocery order and/or delivery services to have groceries ready for pickup or delivered.

This used to exist in Gojee, with ingredient tagging. AFAIK they abandoned that feature to focus more on recipes and discoverability.

Another interesting variation is recipes presented as Gantt charts, or especially a sequence of courses presented as such so you know what to prepare in advance, what to do just before serving, etc.

Not Agile enough :p

I quite like the chart representation used in cookingforengineers.com, showing the parallelism in a recipe, eg

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/87/Carrot-Pulp-Cak...

Came here to post this as well. Essentially, he's using the Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams for food recipes (instead of software recipes).

Awesome, I'm working on some ways of slicing through recipe data right now (cocktail recipes, really), and I'll consider this tree structure as I go about things.

There is an old format called Mealmaster

Direct link : http://cooking.nytimes.com/

Mark Bittman (NYT Food columnist) has had an iOS app [1] out for a while, "How to Cook Everything". I can't remember why but this app was put on sale some time ago for $0.99 and I snapped it up. It's great--I've never had a bad meal from a Bittman recipe.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/how-to-cook-everything/id409...

That app was free at times too. Well worth whatever you pay for it.

I basically learned to cook by watching his "minimalist" series of videos on the New York Times website -- Bittman is a great resource on food. How to Cook Everything is essential.

That's probably derived from his great book "How to Cook Everything", http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Completely-Revised-Annivers....

Often, when I see some complicated recipe in a magazine, I turn to this book for the basic essentials of the recipe (and a great list of recipe variations and ingredient tips).

Their 53 videos on cooking techniques is nice too (the landing page only lists a few):

http://www.nytimes.com/video/cooking-techniques

Nice, just watched all of them. One thing I know for sure now is I need a sharper kitchen knife.

You got through all of them in an hour?

p.s. go to 'Sur La Table' and get a good sharpening stone for your knives. Also, I prefer 'Global' kitchen knives... but you'd be astounded what some people make if you checkout /r/knives...

yeah, there at most a minute long. Really Nice UI having it stay in full screen switching between the videos. The other thing they did well is having a super short title sequence.

And now I have a new hobby.

Check out /r/throwing too if you're inclined..

I started cooking at the beginning of this year as a new year’s resolution and came to the same conclusion very quickly.

A friend recommended Rada knives and they have been excellent. They are very inexpensive and the reviews are outstanding — with many people saying they outperform much more expensive knives.

I’ve been very happy with them … check them out: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002KV46M0?tag=13r-20

Apparently I've been holding my chefs knife like a murderer instead of a person trying to be a cook

I've enjoyed digging out older recipes from the 1700's and 1800's from "The Whole Duty of a Woman": https://archive.org/details/wholedutyawoman00unkngoog

Everything from main courses, soups, side dishes, pies, desserts is in it.

I might add that since there are no ovens back then, you have to improvise to the instructions of "hold over fire", and "bake 'till brown", ect.

Serious hats off to whomever designed and built this site. Fast, beautiful, and predictable.

The only thing missing is search recipe by ingredients I have on hand.

Really? Middle clicks (to open in a new tab) don't work.

Edit: turns out ordinary clicks don't work either, unless I enable some Javascript. I've not worked out which of the 10 or so JS sources need to be whitelisted.

Edit #2: middle clicks on the main page still don't work even with all JS enabled.

Edit for downvoters: Recipes should be the perfect example of the web as documents. We literally have books of recipes going back for 1000s of years - what more of an example of documents could you need? You can enhance these documents with interactivity, sure, but the basic recipes can be presented as plain text and images just fine.

The BBC's cooking website works very well without JS.

I don't think there is a way to ask this without sounding rude, but it isn't my intent, please don't interpret it that way:

Do you really have an expectation of anything on todays internet to work without JS running?

That's a bit of a straw man, isn't it? The homepage is just a basic page with recipes. Without JS, you can't even klick a recipe to view it, that just seems stupid to me. We've had a working tag for that for 20 years now, why would you break it? Sure, you could also build the whole thing in flash, but what's the point?

Yes, it should work. Even if work means simply displaying plain blue links on a solid white page.

At least with rather aggressive third-party blockers in place. I don't expect everything to work, but basic reading, normal pictures and links should work.

I do, and you should too. Enabling JavaScript for all sites is a security risk (drive-by downloads, etc.), and makes far too much tracking crap possible. Since a huge number of sites are user-hostile with JavaScript enabled (loading huge amounts of JS for tracking purposes, that not only slows down load times and uses up precious bandwidth (especially important in countries where ISPs have overage charges for going over bandwidth limits), but also bogs down my computer when it’s still running in the background a minute after the page has loaded. Frankly, if websites are going to be so hostile to the user, the user should have no issues with returning the sentiment; I block JavaScript on all sites by default, and only enable it for certain types of content (like web apps, which you can’t expect to do anything useful without it) or sites that I trust. Otherwise, if I can’t even read a page’s textual content without JavaScript, I just don’t bother… it’s not worth my time.

You're free to want sites to work without JS, but to be realistic about it, that battle was lost loooong ago. Sort of like the old definition of "hacker" vs the one the media has used for the last 20 years.

It's probably more useful to figure out how to make the all-sites-require-js world more secure and less trackable than to try to turn back the clock 20 years.

(Of course you're free to block all JS, insist on how it should ok, etc etc etc.)

“You're free to want sites to work without JS, but to be realistic about it, that battle was lost loooong ago.”

Sites should at least work without JavaScript. Or are you saying we should just throw accessibility under the bus?

“It's probably more useful to figure out how to make the all-sites-require-js world more secure and less trackable than to try to turn back the clock 20 years.”

Blocking JavaScript works right now. Or are you saying end users should just patiently wait until these issues affecting them right now are fixed? It’s not like it isn’t happening… consider how many people have been tricked even by something like this¹. My parents are actually pretty new to the Internet, and I’ve made sure that I have them using something like NoScript. Of course, it breaks some sites for them, but that’s far preferable to them accidentally infecting their computer and putting their financial info at risk.

――――――

¹ — https://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud-scam/2013/07/fbi-ransomw...

"You're free to want sites to work..."

How do you define "work"?

My definition of not working would be failure to receive a 200 response and some useful content.

The text of every recipe on this site is viewable without Javascript. In my experience, this is the case with most websites today.

I know the Javascript on website must do something to enhance the plain text of the recipe. Javascript is a cool language and I respect the creativity of web developers.

By not using Javascript I may have to forgo the "user experience" the developer has prepared for users, however I still get the text of the recipe. For me, that is enough. In other words, the website "works".

I use NoScript all the time, so yes.

    > Do you really have an expectation of anything o
    > todays internet to work without JS running?

Yes, most of it works just fine. Larger sites tend to have graceful fallbacks sensibly implemented, too.

I think people downvote because the Javascript ship has largely sailed.

I assume you are talking about the recipe cards not being links? It's tough to build a linkable card with links inside the card without using JavaScript. The actual html link is the title of the recipe so you should be able to use that if you really intend to not use JavaScript.

I'm in the process of putting together a pull request to make sure the link underline shows on hover (that worked at one point!) and to get middle-click working on the card for users that do use JavaScript.

Thanks for your feedback!

> I assume you are talking about the recipe cards not being links? It's tough to build a linkable card with links inside the card without using JavaScript.

The cards on the main page don't even have additional links in them. And for those with the save/cooked buttons (I assume that's what you mean by "links inside them"), why can't the main elements be linked? The bar with save/cooked would cover them up on hover? What am I missing (Touch interfaces?)?

There's quite a few interactions that don't work right now, even with JS enabled:

Middle-click? broken. (and if you add JS-handling, I hope that doesn't mess it for people that have middle-click assigned to other functions)

CTRL-click? broken.

"Right-click -> open in new window"? doesn't exist, because not really a link.

Again, thanks for the feedback. Right now, I'm literally putting together a pull request to improve this functionality.

Some cards do have links inside of them - they may have external source links or sticker links, and fortunately we just removed author links which will make this easier. I'm wrapping inner elements in hyperlinks which should fix everything that you mentioned.

As I mentioned, for the moment, you can use the card titles which are wrapped in hyperlinks.

Thanks for listening and reacting to feedback :)

I always fail at converting measurements from US recipes because it looks like there are many different varieties of "cups" :) What is the best known conversion table fore recipes? (I live in Europe, usually ingredients are measured in grams and millilitres depending if they are dry or liquid).

I usually use Google (or for things like oz, switch the units on my kitchen scales).

You probably know this, but given the context (GP was talking about measuring cups) it's important to know that ounces can refer to a unit of volume (1/128th of a gallon) or a unit of weight (1/16th of a pound). They are equivalent for water, almost equivalent for most liquids, and not equivalent for most solids. It's just like if we had one word that meant both liters and kilograms.

>ounces can refer to a unit of volume (1/128th of a gallon) or a unit of weight (1/16th of a pound)

Unbelievable. Surely at some point someone must have realised thats a terrible idea?

That's why you'll hear the phrase "fluid ounces".

Well, that's a bad way to look at it.

A fluid Oz is 1/16 of a pint.

An oz of weight is 1/16 of a pound.

A pint of water weights 1 pound ("A Pint's a Pound, the World Around").

Aside: I actually like the customary system for fluid measurements; it's based on halves and as such is divisible by eye, not requiring graduations.

> or a unit of weight (1/16th of a pound).

Or 1/12 of a pound, though, to be fair, I don't think anyone uses troy ounces in recipes.

> They are equivalent for water, almost equivalent for most liquids, and not equivalent for most solids.

Even solid foods are often right around the same density of water, so its often quite close for solid foods. (And, usually, if volume is intended rather than weight, listings will specify fluid ounces.)

I use the windows calculator's "convert" functionality. :/

There aren't really different varieties of "cups". 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces, or ~237 mL.

I think the one exception is a cup of coffee, which is 6 oz. And to make it more confusing, if mentioned in a recipe, it could actually mean 8 oz!

Phrasing seems off here. Can you identify a recipe that uses "1 cup coffee" to mean 6 oz? I'd expect, very strongly, that "1 cup coffee" in a recipe would refer to 1 cup, and 6 oz would be indicated as "3/4 cup".

Any coffee-maker will be measured in 6 oz "cups".

A bag of coffee will say "X Tablespoons makes Y cups", and mean 6 oz cups.

Those are not recipes. Also, the second example is measuring the coffee in tablespoons.

"Mix X T of coffee with Y cups of hot water" is a recipe, and measures something in 6 oz cups.

This is just an error on your part. Y cups of hot water measures 8 oz cups.

In trying to back up your claim for you, I checked three brands of instant coffee: Folgers, Nescafe, and Maxwell House (chosen because they were the brands I saw when searching Amazon for "instant coffee"). Folgers provides a website full of coffee-related recipes. Here are a few:

http://www.folgerscoffee.com/coffee-how-to/how-to-make-coffe...

"How to make coffee" tells us that a single-serve coffee packet should be added to "6 fluid ounces" of water (or optionally, milk).

http://www.folgerscoffee.com/coffee-how-to/how-to-make-coffe...

"How to make coffee (in a coffee maker)" tells us that a "serving size" is "6 fluid ounces", and that however much water you put in to the coffee maker, you should add about 1 tablespoon of coffee per 6 oz water for mild coffee and double that for strong coffee.

http://www.folgerscoffee.com/coffee-how-to/how-to-measure-co...

"How to measure coffee" makes no particular recommendation on serving sizes, but implies that natural measurement amounts are "6 fluid ounces", "30 fluid ounces", and "60 fluid ounces" of water.

http://www.folgerscoffee.com/coffee-drink-recipes/vanilla-la...

"Vanilla Latte", a recipe which includes brewed coffee as an ingredient, calls for "1/2 cup milk" and "1/4 cup" brewed coffee. If we assume they're still thinking that 6 oz is a natural serving size, then 1/4 cup of brewed coffee is, according to the folgers people, 2 fluid ounces. In fact, they have several different recipes under different categories ("latte", "mocha", "cappuccino"...) all of which call for (1) 1/2 cup milk; (2) 1/4 cup either water or brewed coffee; and (3) a generous dollop of flavoring, usually syrup.

I didn't find any single-serving recipes for Nescafe or Maxwell House (or Kraft, which owns Maxwell House), so I looked at the packaging:

http://www.amazon.com/Maxwell-House-Roast-Ground-Coffee/dp/B...

Maxwell House helpfully informs us that coffee should be mixed one tablespoon of coffee to one "serving" of water, or 8 tablespoons of coffee to ten "servings" of water. They also note, "1 serving of water is 6 fl oz (3/4 cup)".

http://www.amazon.com/Nescafe-Classic-Instant-Coffee-Ounce/d...

Nescafe says "Use 1 heaping teaspoon of coffee per cup". However, it is immediately apparent that "cup" is not a measurement, because step 2 is "Pour 6 oz hot water over coffee".

But wait! I did find a coffee recipe ("Pumpkin spice latte") on Kraft. It's multiple-serving, which is the ideal case for an instruction of the form "Mix X T of coffee with Y cups of hot water". But here are the relevant ingredients:

1. "1/2 cup GEVALIA House Blend"

2. "1 qt. (4 cups) water"

There's no way to interpret those cups as being 6 ounces, since 4 of them make a quart.

In sum, you have no clue what you're talking about. Where did you get this idea, and why are you polluting the comments with it?

When I lived in Canada, my mother's cup set had a 250ml "1 cup" and my grandmother had a 284ml one.

I just bought a measuring cup set here in Japan and the 1 cup measure is 255ml.

If that's not bad enough, a "cup" is 150ml when measuring coffee and 180ml when measuring rice.

Unfortunately, "cup" is not a standard measurement. :)

I think GP meant that in the U.S. it's pretty standard.

I live in Canada and my measuring cup is 250ml and so is my mother's. I think it's the standard here now. I've seen 284ml, but that's only on older ones.

There are. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_%28unit%29

The fact that different countries have different standard "cups" isn't really relevant to "converting measurements from US recipes". The US has just the one cup.

There is the "Metric Cup"[1] commonly used in Australia. It is 250 ml, which is occasionally a significant enough difference to be important. The US Cup has two definitions; the "Customary Cup" (237ml) and the "Legal Cup" (240ml). The difference between these is rarely significant.

The (rarely used) UK Cup 284ml, and the Japanese Cup is 200ml.

If you don't live in the US and get a random recipe book, these differences are confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_%28unit%29#Metric_cup

> which is occasionally a significant enough difference to be important

Other factors likely to be (more) important: (a) Measuring dry ingredients by volume (b) The specific sub-type/quality of ingredient used.

Measure dry by volume, otherwise you'll have fun making density corrections.

A liter is about a quart and there's 4 cups per quart so figure a cup is about 250 mL volume. Or a half cup would be about 125 mL, etc.

WRT liquid most medical types like to think a teaspoon is about 5 mL and a tablespoon is three teaspoons aka 15 mL.

Good luck with pastry and cake recipes, those require real precision. Everything else, just get the ratios about right and you'll be fine.

Measure compactible dry by weight*. A "cup" of flour can be anywhere from 4-8oz, but is commonly 4oz when a cup is called for in a recipe.

Yeah... I hate recipes calling for "X amount brown sugar (packed)"...

I have several boxes of brown sugar handed down to me from my parents years ago.... I just get out a serrated knife and cut out X amount packed! ;)

I bought a cheap set of measuring cups online so I can make US recipes. It was something similar to this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Andrew-James-Stainless-Steel-Measuri...

> I always fail at converting measurements from US recipes because it looks like there are many different varieties of "cups"

American; never heard of such a thing. There's a unit of volume called "cup", and it's the same (~237 mL) everywhere.

We measure spices by volume, not weight: 1 cup = 16 tablespoons ("tbsp"); 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons ("tsp").

In Canada, my measuring cup is 250 mL.

It is generally excellent. We've been using NYT recipes for many years, and only very rarely had misses from it. It does sometimes ask for things that are a bit unreasonable, though - the one we made last night asked us to whip 4 tablespoons of heavy cream before folding it in, as well as making our own "corn broth".

What's unreasonable about the heavy cream? I don't know what's involved in the corn broth so I can't comment on that.

It's just a really small amount of cream to whip, the whipping isn't really necessary (we didn't whip, turned out great).

This is cool as another resource to get seemingly curated recipes, but there's not really a place comment, sort/filter/search recipes, make changes or see user reviews before viewing an individual recipe.

Usually, I use allrecipes.com and pick only 4.5+ star recipes. It's pretty good overall considering the zillion of recipes available of widely-varying quality, though it requires some filtering to find something near to what you want. The major limitation to allrecipes is it's hard to modify a recipe to make your own variant, which should be effortless as "forking" (pun intended) on github.

I've also looked at recipe APIs-as-service like Yummly, but it's ridiculously expensive for anything other than massive, establish projects, so it's basically unusable. Most shops would be better off scraping from a bunch of AWS small instances for cheaper.

I'd love to see a similar thing for repairs for cars.

Many of the procedures detailed in the service manual for my car are useless because the manual has too many variants merged together, and omit mine.

I highly recommend "The Silver Spoon", a compendium of 4000 Italian recipes and in Italy it has been popular from the 1950s. After 11 years of translating efforts, it was released in English a few years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_cucchiaio_d%27argento

Is the dataset available for download?

Sounds like bad news for operators of other recipe websites, likely to be pushed down one spot in the results across a range of searches. But nice for readers.

Somebody go train a recurrent neural net to generate some random recipes for us =)

https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/

Can someone explain to me why this is such a big deal? Does the NYT have exceptional cooking recipes? Because there are a million other recipe sites.

Great news if you're going to be scraping for recipes - the recipes have Schema.org microdata with nutritional information.

The NYT's backends (for saving recipes etc) appear to be 503ing right now...

recipes suck. They have no life in them. They're technology, man using memory in place of spirit to copy, not create.

there may come a time when I use recipes, but I prefer building pyramids to buying them.

Recipes are like algorithms. Learning the classics is a good way to get started.

I can't remember the last time I followed a recipe to the letter, but I often use them as a jumping off point.

Exactly.

Maybe it's easier to think of them as apps -- a complete thought as a point of inspiration.

well, like most apps, I'd rather use a webbrowser, than something specific than something that takes memory to run it's own instance of. lol

I usually do it the first time but next time the fun begins.

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