
The New York Times Makes 17k Recipes Available Online - edward
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-new-york-times-makes-17000-tasty-recipes-available-online.html
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bradbeattie
Needs community tagging of recipes. The recipe of the day is vegan and
vegetarian, but has neither tag (both of which already exist:
[http://cooking.nytimes.com/tag/vegan](http://cooking.nytimes.com/tag/vegan)).
No doubt this problem exists for other tags and other recipies in the
database.

Edit: A cursory search through the BBC's recipe database shows their tags to
be notably more thorough, though at times mistaken (butter labeled vegan in
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/sugar_and_spice_67172](http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/sugar_and_spice_67172))
and unfortunately just as immutable at the NYT site.

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awhitty
They also have great write-up detailing their use of CRFs to extract
structured data from recipes.

[http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-
structur...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structured-
data-from-recipes-using-conditional-random-fields/)

~~~
nsrivast
I've often thought recipes could benefit from a more structured
representation. One idea I had was to recursively define a recipe as either:

A) a raw ingredient

B) a procedure (measurement [4 cups, 2 stalks, 3 pinches], reduction [slicing,
dicing, julienne], combination [folding, mixing, blending], heating [sautee,
fry, bake, roast]) on one or more _recipes_

It would be interesting to compare the resulting recipe "trees" across region,
cuisine, chef, etc.

~~~
prawn
Another interesting variation is recipes presented as Gantt charts, or
especially a sequence of courses presented as such so you know what to prepare
in advance, what to do just before serving, etc.

~~~
mark_h
I quite like the chart representation used in cookingforengineers.com, showing
the parallelism in a recipe, eg

[http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/87/Carrot-Pulp-
Cak...](http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/87/Carrot-Pulp-Cake-Part-I)

~~~
jschulenklopper
Came here to post this as well. Essentially, he's using the Nassi–Shneiderman
diagrams for food recipes (instead of software recipes).

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kqr2
Direct link : [http://cooking.nytimes.com/](http://cooking.nytimes.com/)

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chrissnell
Mark Bittman (NYT Food columnist) has had an iOS app [1] out for a while, "How
to Cook Everything". I can't remember why but this app was put on sale some
time ago for $0.99 and I snapped it up. It's great--I've never had a bad meal
from a Bittman recipe.

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/how-to-cook-
everything/id409...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/how-to-cook-
everything/id409936319?mt=8)

~~~
jschulenklopper
That's probably derived from his great book "How to Cook Everything",
[http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Completely-Revised-
Annivers...](http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Completely-Revised-Anniversary-
Edition/dp/0764578650).

Often, when I see some complicated recipe in a magazine, I turn to this book
for the basic essentials of the recipe (and a great list of recipe variations
and ingredient tips).

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brokencup
Their 53 videos on cooking techniques is nice too (the landing page only lists
a few):

[http://www.nytimes.com/video/cooking-
techniques](http://www.nytimes.com/video/cooking-techniques)

~~~
icpmacdo
Nice, just watched all of them. One thing I know for sure now is I need a
sharper kitchen knife.

~~~
samstave
You got through all of them in an hour?

p.s. go to ' __ _Sur La Table_ __' and get a good sharpening stone for your
knives. Also, I prefer 'Global' kitchen knives... but you'd be astounded what
some people make if you checkout /r/knives...

~~~
Agustus
And now I have a new hobby.

~~~
samstave
Check out /r/throwing too if you're inclined..

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esaym
I've enjoyed digging out older recipes from the 1700's and 1800's from "The
Whole Duty of a Woman":
[https://archive.org/details/wholedutyawoman00unkngoog](https://archive.org/details/wholedutyawoman00unkngoog)

Everything from main courses, soups, side dishes, pies, desserts is in it.

I might add that since there are no ovens back then, you have to improvise to
the instructions of "hold over fire", and "bake 'till brown", ect.

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pcurve
Serious hats off to whomever designed and built this site. Fast, beautiful,
and predictable.

The only thing missing is search recipe by ingredients I have on hand.

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rwmj
Really? Middle clicks (to open in a new tab) don't work.

 _Edit:_ turns out ordinary clicks don't work either, unless I enable some
Javascript. I've not worked out which of the 10 or so JS sources need to be
whitelisted.

 _Edit #2:_ middle clicks on the main page still don't work even with all JS
enabled.

 _Edit for downvoters:_ Recipes should be the perfect example of the web as
documents. We literally have books of recipes going back for 1000s of years -
what more of an example of documents could you need? You can enhance these
documents with interactivity, sure, but the basic recipes can be presented as
plain text and images just fine.

The BBC's cooking website works very well without JS.

~~~
zer00eyz
I don't think there is a way to ask this without sounding rude, but it isn't
my intent, please don't interpret it that way:

Do you really have an expectation of anything on todays internet to work
without JS running?

~~~
arm
I do, and you should too. Enabling JavaScript for _all_ sites is a security
risk (drive-by downloads, etc.), and makes far too much tracking crap
possible. Since a huge number of sites are user-hostile with JavaScript
enabled (loading huge amounts of JS for tracking purposes, that not only slows
down load times and uses up precious bandwidth (especially important in
countries where ISPs have overage charges for going over bandwidth limits),
but also bogs down my computer when it’s still running in the background a
minute after the page has loaded. Frankly, if websites are going to be so
hostile to the user, the user should have no issues with returning the
sentiment; I block JavaScript on all sites by default, and only enable it for
certain types of content (like web apps, which you can’t expect to do anything
useful without it) or sites that I trust. Otherwise, if I can’t even read a
page’s textual content without JavaScript, I just don’t bother… it’s not worth
my time.

~~~
Frondo
You're free to want sites to work without JS, but to be realistic about it,
that battle was lost loooong ago. Sort of like the old definition of "hacker"
vs the one the media has used for the last 20 years.

It's probably more useful to figure out how to make the all-sites-require-js
world more secure and less trackable than to try to turn back the clock 20
years.

(Of course you're free to block all JS, insist on how it should ok, etc etc
etc.)

~~~
arm
_“You 're free to want sites to work without JS, but to be realistic about it,
that battle was lost loooong ago.”_

Sites _should_ at least _work_ without JavaScript. Or are you saying we should
just throw accessibility under the bus?

 _“It 's probably more useful to figure out how to make the all-sites-require-
js world more secure and less trackable than to try to turn back the clock 20
years.”_

Blocking JavaScript _works right now_. Or are you saying end users should just
patiently wait until these issues affecting them right now are fixed? It’s not
like it isn’t happening… consider how many people have been tricked even by
something like this¹. My parents are actually pretty new to the Internet, and
I’ve made sure that I have them using something like NoScript. Of course, it
breaks some sites for them, but that’s far preferable to them accidentally
infecting their computer and putting their financial info at risk.

――――――

¹ — [https://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud-scam/2013/07/fbi-
ransomw...](https://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud-scam/2013/07/fbi-ransomware-
now-targeting-apples-mac-os-x-users/)

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tbassetto
I always fail at converting measurements from US recipes because it looks like
there are many different varieties of "cups" :) What is the best known
conversion table fore recipes? (I live in Europe, usually ingredients are
measured in grams and millilitres depending if they are dry or liquid).

~~~
skyyler
There aren't really different varieties of "cups". 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces, or
~237 mL.

~~~
Sukotto
When I lived in Canada, my mother's cup set had a 250ml "1 cup" and my
grandmother had a 284ml one.

I just bought a measuring cup set here in Japan and the 1 cup measure is
255ml.

If that's not bad enough, a "cup" is 150ml when measuring coffee and 180ml
when measuring rice.

Unfortunately, "cup" is not a standard measurement. :)

~~~
zwily
I think GP meant that in the U.S. it's pretty standard.

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ericd
It is generally excellent. We've been using NYT recipes for many years, and
only very rarely had misses from it. It does sometimes ask for things that are
a bit unreasonable, though - the one we made last night asked us to whip 4
tablespoons of heavy cream before folding it in, as well as making our own
"corn broth".

~~~
azinman2
What's unreasonable about the heavy cream? I don't know what's involved in the
corn broth so I can't comment on that.

~~~
ericd
It's just a really small amount of cream to whip, the whipping isn't really
necessary (we didn't whip, turned out great).

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bmir-alum-007
This is cool as another resource to get seemingly curated recipes, but there's
not really a place comment, sort/filter/search recipes, make changes or see
user reviews _before_ viewing an individual recipe.

Usually, I use allrecipes.com and pick only 4.5+ star recipes. It's pretty
good overall considering the zillion of recipes available of widely-varying
quality, though it requires some filtering to find something near to what you
want. The major limitation to allrecipes is it's hard to modify a recipe to
make your own variant, which should be effortless as "forking" (pun intended)
on github.

I've also looked at recipe APIs-as-service like Yummly, but it's ridiculously
expensive for anything other than massive, establish projects, so it's
basically unusable. Most shops would be better off scraping from a bunch of
AWS small instances for cheaper.

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WalterBright
I'd love to see a similar thing for repairs for cars.

Many of the procedures detailed in the service manual for my car are useless
because the manual has too many variants merged together, and omit mine.

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somberi
I highly recommend "The Silver Spoon", a compendium of 4000 Italian recipes
and in Italy it has been popular from the 1950s. After 11 years of translating
efforts, it was released in English a few years ago.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_cucchiaio_d%27argento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_cucchiaio_d%27argento)

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j2kun
Is the dataset available for download?

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_delirium
Sounds like bad news for operators of other recipe websites, likely to be
pushed down one spot in the results across a range of searches. But nice for
readers.

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lucidrains
Somebody go train a recurrent neural net to generate some random recipes for
us =)

~~~
wesleyy
[https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/](https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/)

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dayaz36
Can someone explain to me why this is such a big deal? Does the NYT have
exceptional cooking recipes? Because there are a million other recipe sites.

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thomasfoster96
Great news if you're going to be scraping for recipes - the recipes have
Schema.org microdata with nutritional information.

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aiiane
The NYT's backends (for saving recipes etc) appear to be 503ing right now...

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rancur
recipes suck. They have no life in them. They're technology, man using memory
in place of spirit to copy, not create.

there may come a time when I use recipes, but I prefer building pyramids to
buying them.

~~~
learc83
Recipes are like algorithms. Learning the classics is a good way to get
started.

I can't remember the last time I followed a recipe to the letter, but I often
use them as a jumping off point.

~~~
azinman2
Exactly.

Maybe it's easier to think of them as apps -- a complete thought as a point of
inspiration.

~~~
rancur
well, like most apps, I'd rather use a webbrowser, than something specific
than something that takes memory to run it's own instance of. lol

