Cookstr, a food site that samples recipes from cookbook superstars and celebrity chefs, recently launched in beta. The site hopes to give users a sample of recipes online and entice them to buy the books. Already signed up are chefs from Jamie Oliver (“The Naked Chef”) to Fergus Henderson (Nose to Tail) to Mario Batali (Chez Panisse) to Madhur Jaffrey (famous for Westernized Indian). It’s mostly a Western crowd, but that’s to be expected.

Cookstr is easy to use, includes helpful browsing (by price, difficulty, cuisine, course, etc), along with some new ways to navigate, namely by mood and taste/texture. Although the content has not yet been tagged with this more evaluative data yet (i.e. nothing comes up when I search for a “meaty” dish), it is a promising indication of the operation’s (hopefully) more playful and true-to-life approach to recipes. I have been hoping for sites to catch on to browsing recipes in the subjective way I think about selecting them (i.e. I cook whatever I feel like), but this is on the top of my short list of actual encounters.

During my quick survey of recipes, I ran across a couple finds: Nigella Lawson’s red shrimp and mango curry, Alice Water’s Bolognese, and James Beard’s Monkey Bread. I also came across a slew of recipes too “easy” to be any good and this horrifying and yet almost intriguing recipe of Ham in Coca-Cola which Nigella claims to have gotten from the Deep South and have tried first out of amusement.

Although the site will be supported by advertising revenue, the premise is also to use the web to get more home cooks to buy cookbooks. Will it work? Cookbooks are interesting things. I have them but I don’t rely on them as much as I’d expect. There are two reasons I buy cookbooks: 1) the recipes are otherwise unavailable or the book includes some of the cook’s style/technique peppered throughout (e.g. Jamie Oliver, Marcella Hazan, or Alice Waters), and 2) the book is a good reference for technique or standard recipes for a cuisine (The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking, The Joy of Cooking, and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking). Home cooks (myself included) always have sources they trust. For some, it’s a few cookbook authors, for others (like myself), it is a relative or friend. I have also learned my lesson after Mario Batali that celebrity chef’s cookbooks are not worth the time. I abhor “quick and easy” cookbooks or those that cut corner by suggesting you can make an edible soup in under an hour.

I go online to find recommendations (from friends or blogs I like), and also read up on new cooking techniques before getting my hands dirty. When approaching something new like tacos, it’s easier to find 20 recipes online to compare ingredients than amassing a similar number of cookbooks. Of course if I had a trustworthy source on the subject I would go directly there.

When it comes to recipes, there is little sense of ownership anymore. In the publishing world a recipe is considered “original” and publishable if it differs from other, similar recipes by two ingredients or directions. In restaurants, presentation, organized menus, ambiance, and exotic ingredients account for this otherwise lack of originality amongst chefs. Sure, the next cutting edge science/culinary technique will soon surpass the WOW in molecular gastronomy, but these are few and far between. In our current age, cookbooks are compelling much in the way of restaurants: they present a story, a handpicked grouping of recipes (much like a menu), and a promised “experience” for the home cook, taking them away to the hills of Tuscany or wherever. Extract these recipes from the book and bring them to the web and they are nothing more than “good” or “bad” examples of the underlining recipe they describe.

While I do agree that both cookbooks and online recipes have their own space in our kitchen, online publishing is not necessarily good advertising for cookbooks. Cookstr is intriguing, and I am signed up to find out where the site will go. From their about page, I didn’t find much indication. Sampling from published chefs is compelling. It’s only one piece of the much larger problem of how to source recipes and turn them into a manageable cooking schedule and shopping list. I will use Cookstr as one of the many sites I hit whenever I ask myself “What’s for dinner?” But I don’t believe it will have me running to the bookstore or Amazon any sooner.

[TechCrunch]
[The New York Times]

Photos from Cookstr. Jamie Oliver photo by David Loftus, Mario Batali photo by Melanie Dunea, Madhur Jaffrey photo by Lisa Levart