Recipe Sharing: An Online Community Adapted from Your Mother’s Cookbook
Recipes are a big deal in my family. My Great Aunt Ruth has been making her famous fudge for over 50 years. For every birthday, graduation, and funeral Aunt Ruth would show up with trays upon trays of fudge. And one year my mom made the grave mistake of asking for her recipe. Aunt Ruth declared that my mom could have the recipe when she was dead and not a minute sooner.
My mom’s kitchen is littered with cookbooks. When she wants to try a new recipe she pulls out four or five of them and compares the ingredients and instructions and creates an amazing dish. She is a loyal devotee to America’s Test Kitchen books and swears by their chocolate chip cookies.
And despite her best efforts, I have opened a cookbook once in my life. My mom bought me a little cookbook when I moved into my apartment and I opened once to decide I liked my way better.
Recipes used to be family secrets, passed down carefully from grandmothers and kept in Rolodexes in the kitchen or tucked away in pages of cookbooks. You could also ask your immediate friends for their recipes-if they wanted to share them with you. But that was the old medium. Now I find my recipes online. When I want to try a new dish, I pull up Allrecipes.com, a social network for cooking and baking. Members create a profile and can upload their own recipes complete with ingredient lists and instructions. You can also look up other peoples’ recipes and make them for yourself. Under each post is a comments section where members write in how they tweaked a particular recipe to make it work better or increase the flavor. You can also search the site for recipes using key words like specific ingredients or a type of meal.
I like using the site for online recipes because I have more options. Its also much easier to find what I’m looking for with a few key words instead of thumbing through several books. The comments section is a huge help because I can interact with several different people who have made the dish and get their input in a way that is not possible without the internet.
This jump from an old medium to an online community can also be found in Nicole Constables’ book about mail order brides. Her book, Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages details the experiences of women who list themselves with correspondence agencies. These women used to list themselves in physical catalogs, but now they can provide pictures and a personal statement on an agency website and talk to potential suitors via email. For instance, Constable notes that there are “over 350 web sites whose stated aim is to introduce marriage-minded western men to foreign women.” The internet is changing and shaping many communities and it will be very interesting to see how different the world is with all of the new technological developments.
