Cookbooks vs Online Recipes, Copyright, & Best Recipes

Is the cookbook dead? /s

Post internet, print cookbooks and magazines are definitely not as popular as they once were. People tend to google recipes. A search for "banana bread" gets me several recipe agglomeration websites as well as personal blogs, many with modifications in the comments or reviews. Recipe titles have words such as "best", "favorite", "classic", and "healthy".

Just looked up recipe copyright, and ingredients/steps are not copyrighted, only the language.

So some questions.

Do you guys primarily use print recipes, internet recipes, or your own mind to cook? Do print or web recipes give better results?

How often do you think web recipes rewrite recipes from cookbooks without giving credit? What do you think about this?

Is the "best" recipe approach valid, so recipe writers will converge on a true recipe, or is there so much leeway in cooking that this shouldn't really happen by chance?

I mostly use print, because I can stand the recipe book on the microwave and refer to it as I go along (gives me a better chance of not omitting a vital ingredient). On the relatively rare occasions that I use web recipes (often pointed out by the indefatigable MrsLee) the nearest safe place to stand the laptop is on the dining-room table, which makes for a certain amount of scurrying around at critical moments, often for no better reason than to wake the display.

Knowing the number of times I've read several recipes for the same thing, taken the average and then gone and done something else, I doubt very much that the idea of a "true recipe" is anything other than a chimaera. This works in my favour when cooking Roman or other ancient recipes: I don't need to question my use of Thai fish sauce for liquamen or garum, and moskonfyt or jerepigo for the various grades of Roman condensed grape juice.

I have also seen to many attempts to 'improve' a recipe that totally missed what the dish was about.

I can put my iPad where I would put a print cookbook, but I find that the screen needs waking up just as my hands are covered in something that isn't good on screens. However, I seldom follow a recipe closely, so that isn't the biggest problem with web recipes. You don't know who wrote it, how well it was tested, what sort of ingredients they have access to how accurate their oven thermometer is, ... and therefore how much you can trust them. If I have made several other recipes in a cookbook I can adjust for many of these factors. Not to mention that the big publishers insist on a fairly good level of accuracy.

>1 Settings: "Do you guys primarily use print recipes, internet recipes, or your own mind to cook?"

Yes. :)

Have to run to get ready for work now, more later.

There’s an app called Paprika, available for iPhone, iPad and Mac (at least) which will collect, index and format recipes, and seems to override the screen blanking on an iPad so you don’t have to keep waking the screen up. Downside of course is the hit to your battery life. Also, the app is not free, and all versions have to be paid for separately.

I am NOT a good cook, but I do enjoy the unusual/strange/quirky. thus I usually just print a recipe from the net. Problem of course is how to organise these printouts :-)

"Ideal recipe" reminds me of the alchemical hunt for gold. The question is only what's ideal for us.

My working recipe book is a thin (so it opens perfectly flat or folds easily, as necessary) notebook in which I scribble down everything I need to reproduce some cooking feat. It's tattered and besplattered, partially burnt and wavy with liquid stains but still legible. I'd like to see an iPad perform like that. ;)

>6 guido47:

High-tech solutions alert: mine are stapled in one corner and placed inside the notebook when not in use or out when in.

At this stage of my life, I generally cook without recipes for our daily fare. I will use a recipe (from either a cookbook or online) when I have an ingredient I don't know what to do with, or when I am wanting to explore a different cuisine or culture, or when I need an infusion or inspiration of "something different" to wake up our taste buds.

So for instance, yesterday we had run out of the food I had cooked over the weekend. Yikes! I had to cook on a weeknight! I looked in the fridge. There were bits of leftover roasted chicken, celery, broccoli and carrots. I always try to have fresh ginger and onions on hand. The equation added up to stir-fry in my head. Lately I have been watching Marion Grasby cooking videos on YouTube and she did a terrific beef stir-fry which I wrote down ingredients for on a piece of notepaper which is currently floating in my pile of similar notepapers on top of my cookbooks.

I asked my husband to chop the veggies and pull the chicken meat from the bones before I got home from work. When I got home, I looked at that list of ingredients, sort of followed it, chopped up some ginger, garlic and Thai chili, then started cooking. It was fantastic.

So as a rule, I use recipes as a guideline, unless it's something I've never tried before, then I follow it exactly. Except for baking, when I bake I follow recipes, except for biscuits (American baking powder biscuits) and pancakes. Those my brain just knows how to do without recipes anymore.

I embrace all recipe formats. I first got inspired through the cookbooks my mom had, the cooking shows we watched on PBS, and her written recipes. Today I use all these methods as well as the internet. There are a few original recipes I created based on acquired cooking knowledge.

After I see a recipe, I compare various recipes considering taste preference, ingredients on hand, overall current nutritional knowledge. I look through cookbooks I own, public domain cookbooks that are online, and do web searches. I don't see one method as being the go to method. Instead I see them all as more tools for the modern cook and baker.

In regards to copywrite with recipes I think this gets really tricky. If someone posts the directions word for word, yeah I think this is very questionable. But a lot of times recipes evolve or in some cases become mainstream, then the line gets really fuzzy. Take the Nestle Tolhouse Chocolate chip cookie, do we give credit every time we post chocolate chip cookie recipes to them.