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The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection

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It's ironic. Software has affected almost aspect of our lives, except cooking.

You have all these recipes, but no real great way to determine the best version of something.

There are certain techniques (simple techniques) that'll make steak and coffee taste better, but they're hidden amidst a vast empire of information and useless knowledge.

There's another aspect that people rarely think about:

100 years from now, will humans still be cooking food? Or will that be regulated to machines?

If so, you'll need a way to keep track of all the recipes and what humans enjoy the most. You need a way to filter what's good from what's great.

And when you zoom out, it's a problem that's common to GoodReads, Netflix, and information in general.

How do determine what people will like? And how do you grade it?

>100 years from now, will humans still be cooking food? Or will that be regulated to machines?

Of course we will. Cooking is not just enjoyable, but a unique expression of someone's personality.

I come from a food-oriented Italian family and your entire comment just blows my mind.

I'm also Italian (from Italy, not "my great grandpa was half Italian"), if some robot can make me parmigiana di melanzane as good as I can make it, I'll never cook it again.

You’ll spend the same the same amount of time cleaning it instead.

I'm French. I find cooking relaxing.

We enjoy the results of cooking: the food, the experience, the compliments we get.

We also enjoy improving our skill.

But we would be happy to have a mechanical sous-chef who will do all the work and let us focus on the fun creative parts.

And that's only if, there won't be a more enjoyable, activity to do.

And for most meals, we would even prefer not to bother at all.

Look up the Thermomix. It does a lot of those things for you automatically.

It also has a manufacturing fault that gives you third degree burns and the company tried to avoid recalling it, but there's almost certainly a good competitor product out there.

I should've put it another way.

I imagine a hundred years from now, an overwhelming amount of the time, machines will cook food for humans just because it's easier.

But I imagine people will still occasionally cook for themselves, the same way people still play chess against other humans.

Don't we already have that, in the form of the numerous food delivery services? You can log into your "machine" (ie. phone) and order whatever you want. It then magically appears at your front door. It doesn't pop out of a door in the front of the machine, but isn't the effect the same? The "machine" hasn't eliminated cooking today and I doubt that it will have in 100 years.

Personally I've never used an Internet based delivery service, as I prefer home cooking for a number of reasons. I suspect that ease is only a minor factor in food choice.

Food is also complex, in that there are so many combinations. Given 50 possible ingredients, there are a huge number of possibilities (plus interactions between ingredients) if you choose 6 of them to make a meal. How do you capture that in a machine, even neglecting that cooking technology continues to evolve?

You're probably right - Uber Eats et al have already shown that there's demand for this even at high prices.

Yet another simple human pleasure sacrificed at the altar of efficiency...

(To anyone in Australia or with an Aussie VPN, there's a wonderful Bluey episode about this here: https://iview.abc.net.au/video/CH1903Q034S00)

Bluey is great, and as a parent it is relatable in so many ways. But I don't think your link points at a particular episode. At least, not for me.

Name of episode?

My apologies. Bin Night. Classic Bandit episode that touches upon the importance of the mundane things we do.

It's bad enough Netflix algorithms try to shove things in my face whether I like them or not, I don't want the food equivalent doing it literally.

> You need a way to filter what's good from what's great.

Existing algorithms already struggle with being contextual. On youtube/netflix I often want short funny videos, but other times are better to sit and watch that four hour long history of the parthian empire but the algorithms have no context for this and give me the same suggestions at both times. Food would be even worse, different meals for breakfast lunch and dinner, a desire for variety and some deeply subjective preferences would make it all but impossible.

Another issue is that cooking and taste co-evolve together. You could get the worlds best chef to make a meal but it will never be as good as me making the same meal that I've refined over the years and that my taste buds have got accustomed too. For me some of those recipes split off from my Mothers and may have diverged from what everyone else considers normal.

I think this is just part of the human experience we need to keep part of the human experience and just let the robots do the cleaning up.

Has anybody seen a working meal recommendation algorithm? Looking for new dishes which are still appealing to my entire family is a constant struggle.

Hmm...

I think nuance and novelty are too significant in the cooking world to ever allow machines to take over 100% of cooking unless they offer incredible levels of flexibility. We tend to get bored of even the "best" flavors and the "best" is highly subjective. I can't speak for everyone, but feed me my favourite food, even my 5 favourites and I'll be sick of them all by day 10.

Cooking has been massively impacted by software. Even if you’re only talking about home cooking.

The shared information available is truly phenomenal. Sure there’s lots of low quality cooking information, but that’s the same in all domains. It’s many orders of magnitude superior to the pre-internet level of information available.

The ability to sift through all of the information out there, including an endless amount of user generated content, and have it translated from basically any language you want is incredibly useful. Being able to find a video tutorial for almost anything on demand is incredibly useful. Being able to search for shops that stock exotic ingredients is incredibly useful. FaceTiming mom to get her help with a technique is incredibly useful. Having a private GitHub repo for sharing recipes with my friends is incredibly useful.

I’d completely reject the idea that the information revolution hasn’t been hugely impactful on cooking, even if you still have to put in the effort of trying things out for yourself.

Maybe I was being a bit too hyperbolic.

I'm just frustrated at how much better cooking could be.

You're right. It's much better than it used to be.

I just dislike being stuck wandering around the Library of Babel.

I’d suggest that every field of knowledge has/is approaching a Library of Babel type situation. I think the way to navigate it pretty much always boils down to practice, experience, and all the other typical learning behaviours. If you want to follow that path with cooking, you have to really enjoy the process though. Because putting tremendous amounts of effort into home cooking is probably the least efficient way to nourish yourself.

Another problem that I think the field of culinary knowledge has, that a lot of other fields also have, is the prominence of the highly opinionated knowledge sharer. Especially if you’re interested in traditional or culturally significant dishes. Most people will want to try and convince you of the one true way to make something, when really they’ve just got the particular way that they make it. If you want to get past that barrier, you have to take a look at as many different perspectives as you can find, to try and seperate the core characteristics of a dish from peoples individual idiosyncrasies, and put aside the dogma altogether that there even is one truely correct way to make something.

It's not that hard to find great recipes, from respected chefs with good user reviews, that have high likelihood to turn out very tasty.

So how could you improve that? And where's the value?

Yeah, I’m not sure what you’re expecting. There is no substitute for trying the recipe. What do you expect the software to do?

I’m reminded of articles about coming up with the “best” chocolate chip cookie recipe. I found a good one [1] though it’s not the one I remember.

Each recipe is a point in an n-dimensional space, and that’s just considering the amounts of each ingredient.

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-...

I'm not sure to be honest. It's a hard problem to solve. I don't know if it'll ever be solved.

"100 years from now, will humans still be cooking food? Or will that be regulated to machines?"

The wealthy will. I've noticed my wealthy neighbors hire help for everything. Stuff that I don't mind, they hate.

I walk by their empty garages with nothing besides a nice car.

They don't seem to have any hobbies, or interests, besides their work.

They hire help to cook. The hire help to rearrange their furniture, or rearrange their closet. They hire nannies when a parent is not working. They let strangers clean their home.

As a poor guy I like cooking, driving, and even cleaning some days.

Eddie Murphy's bought a nice Porche years ago. In an interview he stated he loved washing, and polishing it. I think that's the difference between the wealthy, and the rest of us?

I enjoy cooking, and even driving, most days.

I have never understood my wealthy (Marin County, CA) neighbors.

Similar efforts:

- The Sifter, a food history research tool https://thesifter.org/

- Indian Community Cookbooks https://communitycookbooks.wixsite.com/website

Oh, man, the Indian one. Thanks tons

Now to take every recipe from this, GPT3 up a 2,500 word meandering story punctuated with 12 banner ads and at the very bottom ... the actual recipe.

https://thisrecipedoesnotexist.com/ might have a shot at this

I can't wait to make one of these.

Perhaps: https://thisrecipedoesnotexist.com/50734

I like this one: https://thisrecipedoesnotexist.com/58969

With wonderful instructions including:

- 1 banana - peeled, pitted and sliced

- Beat 2 tablespoons peach preserves into peach preserves.

- Cool and continue baking 25 minutes in the refrigerator.

So..

How do we do this? Do we need to put the fridge in the oven? The oven in the fridge?

Is being in the oven 'baking'?

Can we further refine the algorithm by having people try recipes so it learns what is possible?

I thought for sure this was meant for a joke and would DNS error. I'm beyond excited it actually exists...thanks!

Anytime! I checked the availability of the domain after reading the parent comment about GPT-3. Seeing that it was registered, it didn’t hurt to see if it was built into a service yet :)

This looks amazing. One of my favorite antiques in my grandparents’ house was a late 1800s/early 1900s homesteading “cookbook” that had basic step-by-step instructions for regular vegetable gardening to how to trap and prepare a squirrel. It was full of awesome survivalist tidbits that were just treated as basic skills everyone should have.

It's amazing to see how different French cookery was before the early 20th century. We had another similar transformation starting in the late '60s - you would never confuse salt with seasoning but today seasoning seems to mean salting. It's quite bizarre, I don't like these culinary neologisms and refuse to use them or accept authorities who do as knowledgeable.

Randomly opened page of chinese cookbook from 1917. https://archive.org/details/chinesecookbook00chan/page/90/mo...

It was a recipe for 'Raw Fish Party' (Yue Sang). [page 90]

Sounded to me like "Yu Sheng" or "Lo Hei" which we have in Singapore around Chinese New Year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusheng

Curiously the Wikipedia says this was 'created and popularized' in the 1960s. But the recipe, although not the same thing, is similar (big mound of grated carrot, radish, topped with stuff for crunch, some fish, some oil, some spices).

No idea what 'Chinese Chow Chow' is, nor the frequently-cited 'Fun Wine' mentioned in numerous other recipes of that book.

This podcast (1) helped me appreciate the intelligence and the mandate of the originators of Home Economics as a vocation. Founding team includes the first woman engineer from MIT.

Edited: Added the book (2) whose author was interviewed for the podcast.

(1) https://omny.fm/shows/gastropod/easy-a-the-superrad-story-of...

(2) https://bookshop.org/books/the-secret-history-of-home-econom...

A health recipe book for diabetes immediately stood out. Would be interesting to see the changes in certain “health” foods/ recipes across time. More importantly, which have stood the test of time?

PLATINAE PE KONEStA f^mangaierat.mtme uerofiradif buumres^mh TtmKiMHtdsfri^ddeflO' htmda^in eapadmriat tisd^deriftH

(real quote from the oldest book on file, as digitized by Google)

While I respect the idea of seeing what we used to make, and how, from my experience old recipes belong as a relic.

Many old recipes use wildly imprecise measuresments, ingredients or tools that no longer even exist, and frankly...are bland.

We have access today to so many more ingredients than in the past, and most modern recipes are much more flavorful as a result.

I think we really take for granted the globalisation of foods and spices.

Editing based on a reply:

This is also survivorship bias. Basically, any old recipe worth keeping is still being printed and/or improved upon in today's recipes.

In a beautiful thread on Twitter, one of the participants related how her grandmother’s recipes only made sense once she talked with the her grandmother about her measurements. A cup? That was the blue cup she kept over there. A tablespoon? Why, that’s this one. A handful? Here ya go, honey. It’s not that those measurements are “wildly imprecise,“ necessarily, it’s that they are quite particular to the cook.

Even if sizes and techniques were standardized, ingredients (and appliances!) weren't. The flour you got was the stuff the local mill made, the vegetables were whatever variety was in season, and the meat was what you could afford or had left over. The older books relied on the cook to adapt them for the peculiarities of their kitchen to achieve a result they were already familiar with.

Standardization only became a widespread thing in the early to mid 20th century. That's about when you start seeing cookbooks increasingly specifying precise quantities of known ingredients and sometimes tailoring to cooks who might not be familiar with the end result.

Much more flavorful? In what way? This strikes me as a really naive perspective on cooking. Also, FYI, “globalization of foods and spices” has been going on since the early days of the Silk Road.

I'm basing it on personal experience, with grandparents and further back recipes.

I don't think something like avocados even existed here, or any type of spicy pepper.

I'm a spicehead, and nothing has any at all. Or much say, umami. Meat and potatoes. Meat and green beans. Add salt or bland spice, if you're lucky. It's basically all I ate growing up.

Today I can buy Nashville hot spice in a can, for example.

I'm sure you can find examples of some things existing in some places. But the silk road didn't run through rural midwest.

Edit to add: Speaking of avocados, and complex favors...imagine a perfect guacamole. With avocados, and spicy peppers, garlic, onion, etc. Does a recipe exist for such a thing before say, 1960?

In regards to your edit, avocados and chili peppers both originate in Mexico. Guacamole was a native dish so it's been around for centuries, but the modern version with onions and cilantro couldn't have existed until the Spanish brought those ingredients to Mexico

Excellent points, but at what time would all of that been written in English and American measurements for American consumers, with ingredients available? I only guessed 1960s, but it very well could have been decades later.

Who makes guacamole with an exact recipe? You don’t need precise measurements for a recipe like that, and if you do you’re doing it wrong.

>In what way?

Not the grandparent, but food in the Anglosphere 70 years ago predominantly consisted of "eat to live" meals such as meat and three veg (with way too much salt).

It wasn't until the post-war migration boom when more interesting flavours (Greek, Italian, Indian, Carribean, South American etc.) started appearing on our general palettes.

That said, there are definitely exceptions to the "bland" rule, such as some fantastic old-school British sausages, smoked/cured meats and cheeses.

A good cut of meat and fresh veggies all cooked appropriately and hit with kosher/sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, quality olive oil, and quality white wine vinegar/lemon juice can still be a wildly delicious meal. At a certain point, it’s less about lack of ingredients than lack of technique.

>A good cut of meat and fresh veggies all cooked appropriately and hit with kosher/sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, quality olive oil, and quality white wine vinegar/lemon juice can still be a wildly delicious meal

I'm not sure if you grew up in an Anglicised culture, but "meat and 3 veg" is almost always boiled.

Some old recipes are really good, like shepherds pie. Maybe that’s why it stuck around though.

Ah. That's something I didn't mention that I should have. Survivorship Bias. So, you can still find recipes for a good shepherd's pie today, so I wasn't thinking of such things in my comment.

How is the copyright issue dealt with for more recent books? There are many from as recent as 2009.

Books under copyright in IA are either available to borrow digitally, in which case they're packaged with Adobe DRM, or are restricted to the blind, in which case they're restricted with Daisy DRM. A quick look suggests these are the former - mousing over them will show "Book to Borrow."

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