Casting off the cookbook

In a time when newspapers are being replaced by the Internet, books with Kindles and phones with Facebook, the food lover has to wonder if the printed cookbook is becoming obsolete.

Prior to this century, the ways an aspiring chef could learn to cook were limited. Recipes were found between two hard covers, by word of mouth or on a handwritten note card stashed in your grandmother’s recipe file.

Today, thousands of food blogs, how-to videos on YouTube and food magazine Web sites exist. Gabi Moskowitz, author of the food blog www.brokeassgourmet.com enjoys the new media.

“Blogging is literally web-logging-journaling, really,” Moskowitz said. “There are things I’ve cooked and posted on BrokeAss Gourmet that I would never cook again, but blogs are honest in their documentation. They’re like a live diary of what I cooked that week.”

For the aspiring chef, the food blog offers a fast and simple way to share recipes with the online world. With so many free blog sites like Blogger and WordPress, even the shyest of chefs can be a food superstar.

Most Google search times clock in at .14 seconds or less, so the speediness of the Internet lends itself well to the short-on-time chef. Whether you need to know the measurements for quinoa, how to cut a butternut squash or the recipe that aired minutes ago on the Food Network, all of the answers can be found online.

Many chefs are becoming double threats: authors of cookbooks and food blogs. Several chefs, including Jaden Hair of www.steamykitchen.com and Ree Drummond of www.pioneerwomancooks.com, started developing a fan following online, and then used their success to write a cookbook. Ivy Manning, Portland chef and author of The Adaptable Feast: Satisfying Meals for the Vegetarians, Vegans and Omnivores at Your Table, achieved this idea backwards. She published her cookbook and then began a blog at www.ivysfeast.com.

“If I get mentioned on www.thekitchen.com, I’ll get a thousand hits in one day,” Manning said. “But there’s so much food blogging out there [that] folks don’t always check back after that. They spend 30 seconds on my site and zoom! They’re off to the next blog.”

Recipe sites fit well in the highly technological world of 2010. On an iPhone or any mobile device with Internet access, a home cook can pull up a recipe and work with digital recipes from their palm. But like the argument concerning books versus the Kindle, many feel cookbooks have too much sentimental value to let them slip away. Kathleen Bauer, another Portland gourmand and author of www.goodstuffnw.com, doesn’t see it happening anytime soon.

“Cookbooks obsolete? Not in my lifetime,” Bauer said. “There are too many great old cookbooks, like my mom’s 1955 version of the Betty Crocker cookbook or obscure out-of-print books that will never go online.” 

The cookbook, unlike a Web site, can sit in your kitchen through the decades, capturing the smells and stains from tried-and-true recipes as well as memories. Like many of today’s technology versus sentimentality debates, it’s hard to predict what the future will hold. What we do know is that the love of food will always be present, whether it’s on paper or online.