New York Times Magazine‘s recent (excellent) food issue included a feature on community-based recipe generation. The article, written by Amanda Hesser, praised the power of the home cook:
I began to see that readers had always been integral to the Times food pages, whether they contributed recipes, as Aunt Addie did, or were featured by people like Craig Claiborne, many of whose most famous recipes — David Eyre’s pancake, an incredible date-nut bread, Shirley Estabrook Wood’s zucchini bread — came from friends and readers. Whether readers fell in love with Mark Bittman’s article on Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread and e-mailed it to everyone in their address books, or read a Michael Pollan article and changed the way they bought food, the shape of our food culture, I saw for the first time, did not live in the hands of chefs or the media. It lived in the hands of regular people — home cooks, foodies, whatever label you want to give them — who decide what sticks.
That process led to food52.com, an addictive collection of recipes and reader-generated content. It’s a great place to go when you’re trying to figure out how to finish off the butternut squash from your CSA or how to prepare kale the whole household will love. (And, be sure to check out the reader-generated virtual potluck on nytimes.com).
