[njtransit]

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve cooked recipes off of 50 year old, grease stained index cards written in barely legible cursive, whose ink has all but rubbed entirely away. And it was fine. Worrying about recipe format is like trying to improve reading as a technology. The state of the art is both really simple and really old. It’s hard to mess up (format-wise, recipe content can definitely suck) and it’s hard to improve.

Much more important to me: is the listed cooking time of onions accurate.

[deltarholamda]

I get the desire to computerize it. Think of all the automation that can be done! Automatic shopping lists! Unit conversions! Scale up or down! Not to mention having a good think about how to organize things appeals to the data-driven mind.

But I find cooking to be resistant to this sort of thing, at least if you have a family. Meal planning is more of a negotiation than a tallying of numbers. You tend to cluster around a few, well-honed recipes that are repeated often. And when you're cooking, having a piece of paper or an index card attached to the vent hood or whatever with a magnet is far more user friendly than having to wake up a tablet or a phone.

(Not to mention passing recipes down through the generations. It's not the same to bequeath the recipes to your grandchildren by saying "give me a ssh key and I'll rsync these MySQL tables to your VPS".)