Blogs add a new ingredient to food writing
Blogging is the latest trend in food writing. Just about anyone who likes to cook and has an Internet connection can use free online software to create a weblog, or blog, that allows them to publish stories, recipes, photographs, and videos. Some blogs are edgy, some sassy, and some, like Julie Powell's The Julie/Julia Project -- in which a young New Yorker cooked her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" -- are hilarious recordings of successes and mishaps. The blog became a book.
Since Powell's 2002 blog, which was required reading in some circles, blogs have become wildly popular. Food writing expert and book coach Dianne Jacob, author of "Will Write for Food," recently calculated that there are now at least 200,000 food blogs. On her website diannej.com, she writes that publishers scan blogs for up-and-coming authors, and periodicals now pursue bloggers to write cookbook reviews. Although many blogs, like The Julie/Julia Project, are narratives, a growing number publish recipes, providing readers with a constant stream of free kitchen material. As a result, the way people find and use recipes is changing; some wonder if the role of cookbooks may change, too.
Earlier this month, the Well Fed Network, an online compilation of food blogs, announced its annual food blog awards. This year's winner for best blog overall is Simply Recipes, started about five years ago by Elise Bauer to record her family's food. Simply Recipes isn't funny, and it isn't storytelling at its greatest. Bauer offers recipes. And like most award nominees, Bauer's blog, which receives more than 1 million visits per month, offered a link to Well Fed's awards during the voting process.
Cate O'Malley, owner of the Well Fed Network and overseer of the awards, recognizes that the awards are unfairly skewed to the nominees who get the most traffic. "As with any awards, you run the risk of making it a popularity contest," says O'Malley. "But we had a good mix of undiscovered and more popular blogs."
Before dismissing Simply Recipes as lightweight, consider this: Bauer is posting new recipes continually, most recently roasted parsnip puree, roast chicken with carrots, and butter pecan ice cream. She gets many recipes from her family, who have clipped from newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks for years. Recipes come with a professional-quality photo and often a series of how-to photos. The database, which now holds more than 500 recipes, is searchable. Readers can also post comments or ask for clarification from the writer.
As appealing as that seems, an online database will never replace cookbooks, say industry insiders. For some, the heft and comfort of holding a book, combined with the fact that most ordinary cooks don't use computers in their kitchens (yet) are enough to keep books on shelves for now.
Molly Wizenberg, author of the blog Orangette, thinks cookbooks have a certain amount of prestige that blogs have yet to acquire. Cookbook recipes go through a unique and rigorous editorial and testing process, she says, which blogs don't. Orangette was last year's Well Fed Network winning overall blog.
In fact, many bloggers like to refer to cookbooks and authors when they write. Wizenberg, who often publishes recipes on Orangette based on those in her favorite cookbooks, thinks recipe blogs and cookbooks have a positive symbiotic relationship.
"Blogs are increasing interest in cooking in general," she says, "which has to be good for the publishing world." Wizenberg's first cookbook, tentatively titled "Orangette: The Stories My Kitchen Tells Me," is slated for release in 2008. Sydny Miner, vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster -- and the editor of Wizenberg's book -- insists cookbooks serve a much different purpose than blogs. "Blogs record what their authors are thinking in the moment, and they are wonderful for immediate inspiration," says Miner. But while blogs are most often fragmented and unpredictable, she says, a good cookbook offers a unified vision and allows the reader to expect a certain type of recipe.
Like Wizenberg, an increasing number of cookbook authors are getting their start as bloggers. Heidi Swanson, author of "Cook 1.0" and "Super Natural Cooking," which will be released in February, and Clotilde Dusoulier, author of "Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen," due out in May, were bloggers before they were cookbook authors. Their respective blogs, 101 Cookbooks and Chocolate & Zucchini, are well known.
On the phone from Carmichael, Calif., where she lives and is a partner in Pacifica Group, a technology consulting firm, blogger Bauer says that online recipe writing is reshaping the way people cook. Free recipes have been available on the Internet for years, through large websites like epicurious.com, but until recipe blogs became popular, interaction between authors and users was less common. Bauer thinks that unless cookbook authors create blogs to support their cookbooks, an author can't offer the same sense of community that a blogger can.
Book-bound recipes have always suffered from a phenomenon that Matthew Amster-Burton, author of the blog Roots and Grubs, calls "recipe rot," meaning that something in a book can seem to get stale on the shelf while new recipes are far more exciting.
(Full disclosure: The Globe's website hosts a food blog, Dishing, which also posts recipes, and this writer authors Hogwash, another blog.)
Ultimately, a blog's success depends on the quality of the recipes, writing, and photographs, and whether the author has your taste. This aspect of blogging is similar to cookbooks. But cookbook authors test themselves or hire recipe testers, and they also have editors. Bad bloggers can publish poor recipes repeatedly, regardless of how much traffic their sites see. That means there are many new recipes online that don't work -- a common complaint among Web browsers.
I tested Parmesan chicken, baked in a hot oven with breadcrumbs and cheese, from Simply Recipes, which was homey, simple, and kid-friendly. Winter-into-spring salad, made with radicchio, radishes, and endive, from Orangette was fresh-tasting and season-celebrating. Both were well-written and easy to follow.
It's clear that recipe blogs and cookbooks are going to be compatible for some time. How large a niche recipe blogs find in the food world may just depend on who's writing them -- and whether you're in the mood for what they're offering.
