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flyGuyOnTheSly

I don't see how this could ever truly compete with traditional cookbooks.

I don't want to eat the exact same macaroni and cheese dish served on one side of the country that I can on the other.

I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be standardized, nor should it.

You cannot standardize the world's recipes into a monolithic volume like Wikimedia has done with facts.

I mean you could, but the 7,000 variations on every chef's take on a Reuben sandwich would be a chore to sift through.

Facts rarely change, tastes often do.

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I don't see how this could ever truly compete with traditional cookbooks.

It can easily have the same recipes, and it doesn't need to compete, in the same way Wikipedia doesn't with traditional encyclopedias: when you take away commercial incentive, something can just exist.

I don't want to eat the exact same macaroni and cheese dish served on one side of the country that I can on the other.

Great! Looks like there are a few dozen options, and there are alternative recipes in some of these pages:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=macaroni...

I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be standardized, nor should it.

Wikis are descriptive, not prescriptive. This book seems to be so, as well, making no attempt at standardization. If you have thousands of Reuben recipes you want to input, why not?

You cannot standardize the world's recipes into a monolithic volume like Wikimedia has done with facts.

Wikipedia doesn't standardize anything. You totally can collect them; there are a bunch of cooking sites and applications on the internet, just as there are a bunch of sites that collect facts.

I mean you could, but the 7,000 variations on every chef's take on a Reuben sandwich would be a chore to sift through.

That's what curation is for, and there are plenty of people who search through Wikipedia, find interesting articles, and share them.

Facts rarely change, tastes often do.

This makes a wiki the best possible place for recipes, then. Not only is there no hard-limit on the amount of content (storage is very nearly free, especially given Wikimedia's fundraising numbers), there's also version control history, and HTML has subheadings for variations on the same recipe that might occur over time.

Cookbooks as written by a single chef are generally suggestions and collections of similar tastes, not static lists of every single recipe under the sun.

I regularly seek out cookbooks written by a handful of trusted chefs, and devour the information contained within them with great trust and pleasure.

I don't just go to the library and take out all the cookbooks I can carry home.

Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner, and then make that quickly for my family.

Traditional cookbooks exist because most of us are not chefs and we don't know what goes good with what.

If we did, we could easily make use of a cook's flavor bible which is essentially what this monolithic wiki-cookbook will become imho.

There are two points of relevance here, I think. The first is that yours is one way of consuming recipes, but another is to simply look for news recipe in different cookbooks or, increasingly often, find one at a random food blog. The second is that even collections are very much possible on a wiki, or even outside it, by just compiling links to the wiki articles. For example, I enjoy cookbooks written about a single cuisine (e.g. listing all kinds of Middle Eastern recipes together), because they will then often go well together. One could easily imagine a Wikibooks page compiling related recipes into a recommendation list.

I dunno, a page that lists a bunch of variations on a recipe, curated with some kind of objective ratings system sounds pretty awesome to me.

>Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner

The thing is, after enough experience cooking, you don't need to do this. If you know what the ingredients taste like and you know generally the ratios of each ingredient, you can make a rough estimate of the expected flavour of the final dish in your head. A curated system would help you learn this as you'll start to notice certain ingredients regularly being used in certain situations.

I personally use recipes as a starting point, for most things, some recipes do need to be exact, especially baking recipes, or a general guide. Once i've got a good idea of the main ingredients for a dish I figure out what flavours would add to it.

Cooking doesn't need to be exact, hence why one dish can have 100 different recipes. The secret to cooking is learning the characteristics of different ingredients and how to apply them to your food. Everything in a recipe has a purpose, once you figure out the purpose of different ingredients you can use them sort of without really thinking about them. You start thinking more about the situation of the current dish and what ingredients would go well, rather than what exact recipe you should follow.

I generally agree that this will never be as popular as Wikipedia. But when cooking, I rarely follow the recipe exactly. The existence of a standardized recipe does not imply a standardized dish.

There are already social recipe sites, such as Allrecipes, where people share their own recipes and their own variations of well-known recipes. The Wikimedia Cookbook is just a freely licensed social recipe site.

If you look up a particular recipe online, you end up finding those 7,000 variations scattered across numerous blogs and websites. I don't see any requirement on the number of variations of a recipe that can be added to the Wikimedia Cookbook, and it's no worse to have some of them hosted here.

Add to that the complete lack of prolix life stories for SEO and manual page scanning needed to get to the actual important part - how to cook the dish.

Also MediaWiki's format is fairly minimal in comparison to AllRecipes which has gained an ugly oversized SPO feeling and tries to sell you the ingredients.

If this wiki gains enough popular use such that it appears high up in the search results for recipes like Wikipedia already does for general knowledge it would be extremely convenient.

I agree. Recipes and food are about culture which obviously varies. What it would be good for is seeing a general look at what a recipe is. How do I make this sauce? What are the basic ingredients for chocolate cake? It probably won't ever capture the rich detail of using one technique/ingredient from a particular part of the world, but it's a starting point which someone can then look further into.

Exactly my line of thought.

This wiki cookbook will do swimmingly with answering questions like "What is a roux?" or "How to deglaze a pan?" but it's going to have a hell of a time being used like a traditional cookbook filled with recipes as we all know and love them today.

You can standardize things, if you are respectful of the concept that foods take on geographical characteristics and definitions. For example, the recipe for paella in Valencia, Spain is very specific. However, most of the world says “I want to make it however I like, I will call it Paella Valenciana anyways”. It’s right to customize and make your own versions, but it’s wrong to not acknowledge the fact that true specific definitions do exist in certain cultures and geographies.

Simple example, ever seen a Chicago style pizza? It would be impossible to create a standard “pizza” recipe that covers all pizzas ... but you can have a specific style with a name. Culturally, there are places in the world (for example France) that do treat food recipes this way. The US is too individualistic for this to be found “acceptable” culturally.

It does have facts too, as there are reference pages for ingredients and practices.

As for recipes, I think a neutral recipe can be a good starting point for your learning journey. It would probably be better if they had more references to variations though, similar to Wikipedia's further reading.

>a neutral recipe

What's neutral, though?

There's no accounting for taste.

> I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be standardized, nor should it.

Not that this is what is being attempted here, but rather than one or more recipes that each represents a particular set of curated choices, you could instead create a "recipe as multidimensional model" that captures the entirety of the configuration-space for "the food that is called X", where you can both adjust inputs and see how output parameters (e.g. saltiness, acidity, viscosity) will change, or constrain output parameters to find optimal input parameters.

In other words, something like https://hur.st/bloomfilter/, but for tuning your chocolate-chip cookies.

Would be interesting to see something ala https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes in regards to the variations on recipes on standard recipe “tropes” like Mac and cheese.

Not sure the mediawiki format is great for this however.

Well, despite the huge amount of variations, Wikipedia had a useful category for cocktails, and I never heard anyone complain.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martini_(cocktail)

It could be a good starting point for someone new to cooking, but it's up to individuals to experiment on their own once they feel comfortable.

I agree that attempting to have one canonical recipe for something like "Macaroni and Cheese" is futile and counter-productive, but I don't think this project has to end up like that.

For example, if the Macaroni and Cheese Cookbook page turned into an index for dozens of M+C recipes, named for the cultural influence or ingredient influence, that could certainly be useful.

With the current state of recipes on the internet (most are extremely low quality click-bait designed around ad word integration for profit, for example, searching "instant pot recipes" returns just loads and loads of terrible monetized results) a source like this doesn't have to try terribly hard to be a high quality resource

Even so it feels like it would be more useful as an encyclopedia of flavor than it would be for help making dinner tonight. Learning about the evolution of a dish would be very interesting, but I wouldn't trust an anonymous wiki editor very much in terms of actual cooking

I think the biggest problem to me is that recipes are very much driven by personality. People learn a few chefs/sources that have produced good results for them, and they stick to those sources. They go buy the cookbooks from those people and stay in a safe walled garden where they can trust each recipe

I think another big problem is the low quality of the recipe source. Traditionally listing ingredients with some steps along the way is sufficient for the experienced cook, but good modern recipes (to me) do so much more than list ingredients and steps.

I follow a chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and when he breaks down a recipe (for Serious Eats or his books like The Food Lab) he goes so much more into WHY each decision was made, which empowers you to not just understand the decision but also change it.

For example: The All-American Beef Stew -(https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/01/food-lab-follow-the-rule...) (and the short version https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/01/all-american-bee...) Every aspect of the dish is analyzed and discussed!

Or Fuschia Dunlop's translation of Sichuan cooking for a western audience, (e.g. https://andrewzimmern.com/2013/03/28/fuchsia-dunlops-fish-fr...) she helps distill Chinese culture and the cooking of this region with a lot more than an ingredient list and a step. That information, delivered by a trusted expert, is vital to understanding and mastering a dish from a culture very different than my own.

Why would I want some anonymously written/edited list of ingredients and steps when I can have a professionally produced, multi-media (huge useful step by step images AND video), "scientifically-inspired" discussion of the recipe and why it does what it does?

That's the kicker for me, I'll always go back to Kenji or Alton or Fuschia or someone I trust because I know they have delivered good results and researched the recipe deeply enough to help me succeed not just at their version but at my own version too

>For example, if the Macaroni and Cheese Cookbook page turned into an index for dozens of M+C recipes, named for the cultural influence or ingredient influence, that could certainly be useful.

How could it possibly, though?

I have cue cards I found in my old house when I bought it that have what's probably a local rendition of macaroni and cheese from the 1960s in Hamilton, Ontario...

Can I somehow cite that and insert it into the mac and cheese section of the wiki cookbook?

Or will this just become an digital amalgamation of every printed cookbook in the world? Using actual books as points of reference and citation?

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