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Comment by AntiEgo | Hacker News Reader

A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.

Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.

I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.

What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...

(Edit: formatting)

View on HN

Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.

Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.

But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.

I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.

My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!

> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!

Actually I have tried it! I described my ideas of the meal, and a recipe came out, and it tasted great and original! But I would be careful with the motor oil in your stir fry, that might be a hallucination.

When I first read your message I was honestly crafting a very different response, glad you went with that.

Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.

> My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it!

What weight works best? Synthetic or dinosaur? Have you tried adding a bit of gear oil for more viscosity?

Amusingly, rapeseed oil was originally used as motor oil before being better refined in the 70s, and made suitable for human consumption. branded in North America as canola.

Was even added to cattle feed too.

Sometimes gpt's confusion can make sense.

Canola is still fed to cattle after the oil has been extracted. They also eat the corn husks & cobs left over after canning and the pomace that remains after apples are pressed for juice.

I really think pigs are almost perfect. Sure, cows eat a lot of stuff we throw away, but pigs seemed to be the household recycler. People want sustainable living, and yet throwing all the table scraps to a pig and then eating it a year later is a perfect example.

Oh agreed. I used to get expired produce, prepackaged salads, bread, etc. for free from the local grocery store and feed them to my hogs as supplement to their usual feed. They loved the variety, I think!

Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.

BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.

YES! This is the way. And to these, which I have too, add Fucshia Dunlop for Chinese, Debora Madison for general vegetarian, Maya Kaimal for truly exquisite Southern Indian, and pre-1980 Joy of Cooking for general wisdom (I have 3 copies).

I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.

Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.

I remember getting a copy of the Joy of Cooking a couple of decades ago specifically for the peanut butter cookie recipe (a childhood favorite), and was SO disappointed in the results that I eventually tracked down a 1975 copy to compare. The specifics elude me at the moment, but IIRC, the majo recipe differences came down to about twice as much peanut butter in the 1975 version, and twice as much flour in the new one.

Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.

Yeah I was a hard no on the new edition (my first copy, 1979, was a going-to-college gift from my truly wonderful parents-as-cooks). The reason being was when it came out multiple people noticed that the truly exquisite JoC brownie recipe was now mediocre. Why would they do that?

This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.

Thanks for the tip vegetarian cookbook author. That sounds exactly what I’ve been looking for recently. Any book of hers in particular can you recommend?

I have a hardback first ed. of and can strongly recommend "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I see there is a second edition. I would be wary. Even Fuschia Dunlop modifies favorites in succeeding editions, and I hate that.

We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.

The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).

Try add small pieces of tempeh to your any sauce you cook, it will sky rocket the Unami. I prefer grill it first with oignon/garlic but you can also add it after with the liquids (tomato sauce of course, I’m meditatean). Cook at least 5 minutes because the taste may be too strong if you didn’t try before.

Did my best to match the ISBN and ordered a second hand first edition. Thank you for the recommendation.

Edit: ISBN ostensibly 9780767900140

Haha thanks. I’m not a vegetarian by any means either, but vegetarian food done right, as you say, can be delicious.

Yes. Also a carnivore at heart, but I only cook meat 2 or 3 times a week tops, and have several veggie meals that I totally enjoy. Although my wife and I have a joke argument where we have to decide which we would give up; if we had to: meat OR Cheese. This is a tough one. I think meat would narrowly win, for the massive diversity it offers, and because (as far as I know) it is largely impossible to barbeque cheese.

Also, I remember seeing a comment somewhere to the effect that Indian food is the only cuisine where being Vegan doesn't become a chore.

Cheese-based stuffed eggplant !!

New Complete Vegetarian by Rose Elliot is a well used book in our kitchen.

Small World! I have a copy of her book Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking from 1982, bought when I was a broke student. I had already planned earlier today to use one of its recipes for dinner tonight: Brown Nut Rissoles. !!!!

It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.

As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.

This is exactly what we do too. I even have a hobby of collapsing Julia Child (and now David Chang) recipes into something... manageable in say 2 hrs? I did the David Chang wings and yeah the Super Bowl party was destroyed by them (omfg never had wings like this) but good lawd they took a lot of effort, spread over multiple days.

The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine by John Folse is the essential cookbook for those cuisines if you're looking for authenticity. Folse doesn't play with his food like other chefs in the area, he simply recites the recipes that people have been preparing for over a hundred years.

Thank you very much for telling us about this. Most of my cooking of Cajun and Creole cuisine for the last 30 years or so have come from the gumbopages.com. But the internets are ephemeral, and I need something like this to survive the cuisinapacolypse. $70 for Hardcover – December 1, 2004. Worth it?

Thank you I will check that out, I am a bit annoyed I have a shelf of cookbooks but most are kinda crap. But happy to spend money on a good book that quickly pays for itself after a meal or 2.

Adding another cookbook to this excellent list: Wok by Kenji Alt-Lopez gives a fantastic, technique - based introduction to Chinese and Korean cooking, and includes very readable chapters detailing how to get good outcomes from his recipes. It's seriously levelled up my cooking skills.

OK, how about sharing some cooking resources worth looking into (this is more for future searches)? Here's mine:

1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking

2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.

3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.

4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.

5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).

6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).

> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.

FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.

Thank you. That comment made me feel super old :)

Kenji has an excellent youtube channel that I think should be the starting point for people who want to learn to cook. There's nothing like video to see what it's supposed to look like during the process.

Also funny dad jokes.

https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos

I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired. I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important. It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try. But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil. I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters. I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good. My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them. I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.

Generally America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, and descendant ventures like Serious Eats and Milk Street are mostly good and pitched at a beginner-to-intermediate level. I wish I'd had them when I was learning. I like them all but the "this one thing changed the way I boil water forever" hook they seem to have to have for every recipe gets a little old, and frequently the "trick" isn't worth the time and effort. Also, I've found I have a little Gell-Mann amnesia with their recipes - if I know the cuisine or dish well, their recipes are usually just OK to good, but if I don't, they're fantastic!

Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.

I think Lebovitz "wrote" the Dean & DeLuca cookbook, didn't he? I love that book.

[edit] Nope, David Rosengarten

Anyway, as long as we're making suggestions, my two favorite dessert books are

The Cake Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum. Had it for at least 30 years and was one of the first cookbooks I ever bought.

Classic Home Desserts, Richard Sax. Borrowed from a friend and after she warned me not to get anything on it (was one of her favorites), I got my own copy. Still in frequent use 25 years later.

This surprises me, to be honest. The recipes you see in folklore books for stuff like cookies/cakes and such are almost universally superseded by the recipe that is on the package of the main ingredient that you can buy at the store. Good recipes for any meat dish are similarly available; though there the biggest advance is in safe supplies of clean ingredients and much better home ovens than have ever been available in the past.

As far as books go, I still have fun with Bittman's main books. Few things I can't find in them. You can also explore any of the classics that are referenced easily enough. Though, you are probably best trying to attend a local cooking school for lessons. Don't go for anything too fancy, just standard lessons should be fine.

What sort of recipes are you unable to find?

I disagree here - we are living in a golden age. Modernist series of books does amazing job in breaking down cooking to technique and they are good with classical cooking too. And easy to pirate.

youtube is also full with high quality content. Looking right now in por umm incognito mode on chrome for croissant recipe - from the first 20 recipes - 10 are with viral headlines so not worth watching, but the other 10 seem pretty solid.

Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..

Tangent on representing recipes - Always loved the "Cooking for Engineers" guy's recipe notation (scroll down to just above the comments), they're so clever and concise:

https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/168/Pecan-Coffee-...

I'm building something to automate this. Copy paste recipe text/url -> get flowgraph.

Edit: thought the link was about this: https://fluidvisual.com/flowchartrecipes/

Edit 2: "Chapter 2 Resource theories: Monoidal preorders and enrichment", in particular page 2

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s097-applied-category-theory-...

Edit 3: one problem the representation used on www.cookingforengineers.com has is that it can only represent recipes whose structure is that of a tree: every step can have multiple direct ancestors but leads to only one descendant. Not all steps of all recipes have this "convergence" property. See the lemon meringue pie example in the link above, where yolk and whites are processed separately (filling and meringnue respectively) before being merged in the last step (covering the pie with meringue)

I'd like to see what you make! I see the value in the flow chart, especially the pie you linked.

Regarding the CfE multiple descendants problem, it's not really a problem.

    +-----+----------+-------+---...
    + Egg | separate | White | etc..
    +     |          |-------+---...
    +     |          | Yolk  | etc..
    +-----+----------+-------+---...

or you'd just start with "1 egg yolk" and "1 egg white" for your recipe. Or you'd say "See meringue below" or... some other answer that you like.

Whatever, we're humans, we roll with it.

If the recipe somehow gets too complicated, you make two separate tables, like they did for the recipe above.

My flowgraphs are not worth showing yet. Laying out graphs properly without human intervention is ... very hard, and this is a fascinating field with a lot of ongoing research.

I can however point you to some designs I generated using dall-e (non-sensical and with a perplexing flow, but the illustration are a good start towards something gorgeous): https://imgur.com/a/1NN8DaU

There are also other ways to use LLMs to explore culinary arts, for instance these "equations" pertaining to caramel:

    1. Creaminess (creamy texture in caramel)
    Creaminess ↑ ⇔ Cream ↑ + Butter ↑ + Milk ↑
    Creaminess ↓ ⇔ Sugar ↑ (hard caramel) + Water ↑ (syrup texture)
    
    2. Hardness (firmness or brittleness of the caramel)
    Hardness ↑ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Sugar ↑
    Hardness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Shorter cooking time ↓
    
    3. Chewiness (soft, stretchy caramel)
    Chewiness ↑ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Glucose syrup ↑
    Chewiness ↓ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Sugar ↑
    
    4. Stickiness (caramel that adheres to teeth or surfaces)
    Stickiness ↑ ⇔ Sugar ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
    Stickiness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Shorter cooking time ↓
    
    5. Color (darker caramel)
    Color ↑ (darker) ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
    Color ↓ (lighter) ⇔ Lower temperature ↓ + Shorter cooking time ↓
    
    6. Sweetness (perceived sugar taste)
    Sweetness ↑ ⇔ Sugar ↑ + Cooking time (slightly shorter) ↓
    Sweetness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Salt ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑ (more bitterness)
    
    7. Bitterness (burnt or deeper flavor)
    Bitterness ↑ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
    Bitterness ↓ ⇔ Lower temperature ↓ + Shorter cooking time ↓

It's difficult to get this kind of info without having a lot of experience in a specific culinary space. I've never cooked caramel seriously so I can't tell if this is right (looks like though), but I have started to master ice cream production this summer, and the set of equations ChatGPT generated was on point, so I guess I can trust those too.

Oh my god I love the way they visualize the recipe steps. That's how I write them down (grouping ingredients and steps), but its a table merging rows instead!

That is an absolutely brilliant way to visualize recipes.

Wow! Fantastic!

I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.

I'm not much of a cooker, but I helped my spouse organize her recipes into a little site. The backend is just a SMB file share with one text file per recipe. And there's a perl script that looks for changes, generates the HTML, and pushes it out to the web, so it's easy to reference on the go, maybe while at the grocery store or something. The perl script needs to do a bit of magic around character set detection, because windows likes to do dumb things, but otherwise, it's pretty straight forward, other than kqueue is a bit arduious for watching a whole directory tree (I think Linux has a better api for that, but it's doable in kqueue).

No diff tracking, but you can put notes in as you like, it's just text. You could use git as others suggested too. It's just text, git is good for changes in text files.

I started transcribing them. I’ve been using typst, could probably change back to latex or context or something if needed. I have a git repo, organized in to several sections. I found a template and hacked it to my liking, including a section for comments and remarks and then organized the sections in to chapters.

Took an hour or so to kind of get the framework in to place. We do family meals regularly (eat with your kids, it’s a good thing) and I record the ones they like, add notes as we change them. It’s sort of a secret project, I plan on giving it to my kids as a wedding gift or something. Only about 30 in it so far but I add one or two a month, I try to capture some pictures to go with it.

Why not just put your recipies in a text editor and then use git?

A generational git repo of family knowledge is a fun idea to think about.

>Hey grandpa, can you show me the family brisket recipe?

>Sure grandson. But first, let me tell you what git is.

Throw pandoc into the workflow, and have a new edition printed every year or three at your local print shop.

In the editor, make sure to M-x org-mode. Lots of dated annotations, and a lot of results, in my many recipe files.

Honestly, not a bad idea. I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format. I already use a git-backed Obsidian markdown knowledge base for most of my notes, so it would make a lot of sense to incorporate recipes too.

I think my current recipes app stores entries in the Recipe JSON Schema format[1]. This format is also useful since many websites will offer recipes in that schema. If I could make a conversion layer that transformed between a markdown version and the JSON recipe schema, that would probably be all I need.

* [1] https://schema.org/Recipe

I've looked at a few and I haven't loved any of them. They all have some kind of shortcoming that makes them not usable.

For example, the schema.org schema puts quantities, units, and ingredients in a single field. Fail, IMO.

Other issues include things like not being able to group ingredients or procedures.

I don't have my notes on what I thought of each of the ones I've reviewed handy, but here are some I've looked at:

- https://cooklang.org/

- http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/

- https://recipemd.org/index.html

EDIT - for clarity, added examples of standards

> I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format

Why? Recipes are for humans to read, and we're good at accomodating a wide variety of formats as long as they are reasonably sane.

That's what the idea was. Something you could diff and fork (heh) other recipes using git.

Can you share your chocolate cookie recipe?

Serious Eats itself has kind of gone to shit, its heyday well past. In the past several years while updating the site they've removed a number of recipes and redirected links to inadequate replacements.

Thankfully, it's on the wayback machine and I also have physical copies of Bravetart and The Food Lab.

Serious Eats can still be good, but I basically don't trust anything that wasn't written by Kenji or Daniel Gritzer.

>just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication.

Is this really a problem ? Last time I checked recipes are not subject to copyright laws in most countries although the text of the recipe is. It's pretty important since I'm building a recipe text to recipe flowgraph converter (using LLMs, of course).

Yes, it's a problem when the recipe was adjust just enough to be different from the source, but the person who adjusted and publish it never actually tested the recipe, resulting in readers making garbage, then correcting it in the comments.

I think that's what the person who originally replied was getting at. The people who do that aren't interested in adding to the craft, just generating content.

Adding to your points of dwindling recipe sources and web sites clearly designed to gather clicks instead of deliver good content, LLM-generated recipes are also a problem...and a deceptive one at that.

My son, a professional chef, tried an experiment, using a few different LLMs to generate recipes that looked very legit, even to his eyes, until he tried to make them. They were all edible, but not enjoyable. It became immediately apparent to us how easily someone could generate a food blog site using these half-baked recipes and make money.

I worry now that this has bled into cookbook publishing, the way that a few foraging books written by LLMs have snuck past whatever meager checks and balances exist in the online publishing industry.

https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin...

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