crowdsourced cookbooks

Image courtesy of Discovery Education

Most people shelve their cookbooks in or near the kitchen. This makes great sense. I've been known to stack cookbooks arm's length from my bedside for nighttime reading. A good Nigel Slater easily elbows out novels or must-read nonfiction. No matter the genre, when an author crafts a powerful narrative voice, the read is compelling.

A good story gets me every time.

What Amanda Hesser has done at the New York Times is compile a cookbook with hundreds of narratives: the reader's. As she outlines in her recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article, instead of combing through thousands of recipes herself, Hesser invited readers to help her navigate by telling her their very favorites. This invitation provided Hesser and her assistant, Merrill Stubbs, five years of treasured recipes to comb through, test, and then whittle down to a reasonably sized collection.

Hesser's article does a great job of not only highlighting the particular process of how this upcoming cookbook came to be, but she also takes it one step farther and discusses the role that social networks and new media are impacting the way we eat, cook, and source our food. Her crowdsourced cookbook is just one example of the rich possibilities at play here.

While I expect that Hesser's voice will bind her upcoming cookbook, the book will benefit
from many narratives, woven together.