[HN Gopher] Wikimedia Cookbook
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Wikimedia Cookbook
Author : nerdkid93
Score : 113 points
Date : 2020-02-07 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikibooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikibooks.org)
| mmahemoff wrote:
| I thought it was programming "recipes" for working with Wikimedia
| at first.
|
| The FAQ should probably mention the year it began, which is 2004
| going by homepage history.
| dhosek wrote:
| I misread the title as Mediawiki cookbook and was disappointed to
| learn that it wasn't filled with handy tips for customizing a
| mediawiki site.
| bradford wrote:
| The programmer/engineer in me has been deeply unhappy with
| recipes (both online and in print). The recipes in this online
| book are no exception.
|
| Chief complaint: the ambiguity of description means that ten
| different chefs could follow the recipe and have ten different
| results.
|
| To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion".
| Variables that might affect the outcome include the fine-ness of
| the dicing, the heat of the skillet (is my medium heat the same
| as yours?) and the extent of caramelization. The range of
| outcomes here can be anywhere from a crunchy, almost raw onion,
| to a nearly disintegrated brown paste. Take this and multiply
| with all the other steps involved in a typical recipe and try to
| tell me that the end result is predictable.
|
| Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal
| with this ambiguity? The only place I ever see clear instruction
| on such topics are cooking classes, but that's not convenient and
| it makes me wonder what the point of recipe books are at all.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| You cannot escape environmental factors. As you cook more and
| more, you will understand your kitchen and environment more,
| and learn by feel what "medium heat" is, and how it affects
| food, and why you might use it. These things are always
| guidelines, and intentionally vague.
|
| The most famous example is how most baking recipes call for 2-5
| cups of flour, since the humidity in the air, the season the
| flour was harvested, etc. all affect how much you might need in
| the end. So you just learn when you've added "enough". That
| might make the engineer in you upset, but that's the reality of
| it.
|
| There are no precise steps to "brown an onion", but you will
| know when you've done it correctly. And if you did it wrong,
| that just means it takes more practice and more learning about
| your skills.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion".
| Variables that might affect the outcome include_
|
| Hate to break it to you, but it's even worse. Further variables
| include the moisture content which varies per-onion, the type
| of onion, the size of onion, the thickness of your pan, and the
| material it's made out of.
|
| The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science. Even if
| your equipment stays the same, every chicken breast and every
| tomato you buy is different.
|
| Now it totally drives me nuts when people say "if you follow
| the recipe you can't go wrong!" There are usually 100 different
| ways you can go wrong.
|
| But it's just part of cooking. You learn to cook the same way
| you learned to walk or throw a ball or speak your language:
| through trial and error and careful observation and practice.
|
| The great resource now is YouTube videos, which have the huge
| advantage of letting you see exactly what it's supposed to look
| like when it's done (how brown is brown? how thick is
| thickened?), and just by seeing the types of pans they use and
| the sizes of flames, and the amount of bubbles or sizzling, you
| get actually get a feel for it pretty quick.
|
| Finally, the point of recipe books is to tell you which
| ingredients, rough quantities, and the steps. Just because
| recipes require interpretation (similar to a music score)
| doesn't mean they're useless.
| mech1234 wrote:
| You should get into baking if you want to see where precision
| matters and how it can be expressed in cooking.
|
| Generally, things you cook on the stovetop don't need strict
| quantitative controls. Exercise your own judgement and
| experience- you can understand how the onion will taste based
| on how it looks. Mix it, heat it, season it, eat it.
| bradford wrote:
| So, my wife bakes a lot and I'm witness to the crazy
| precision that it involves. Perhaps that's what partially
| inspired my comment: I felt that the lack of verbosity in
| instruction was impacting my ability to get a recipe to taste
| the way I want it to. (It's the result that I'm pursuing, not
| necessarily the precision).
|
| Case in point: I love Malai Kofta when I get it from the
| restaurant. I have never been able to reproduce the taste at
| home, and I don't have the expertise/judgement to figure out
| why :|
| andrewzah wrote:
| Someone should make a wikimedia for various cooking techniques.
|
| That would actually be useful, unlike this random assortment of
| non-curated recipes.
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| If you want recipes that are a bit more precise, check out
| baking ones. I've frequently heard people say that cooking is
| easy, just throwing ingredients together. The same people went
| on to note that baking, however, is like a precise science: add
| exactly X grams of that, cook at specifically Y degrees, mix by
| rotating counter-clockwise for Z seconds. It's all very
| delicate and precise.
|
| As for regular recipes, I really don't think this type of
| precise writing is popular because everybody's got different
| tastes and palates so it would be tough to say precisely how
| one should 'brown an onion', although I get where you're coming
| from. Personally, I've gotten in the habit of finding recipes,
| trying them out, and saving them with personalized tweaks. So
| when a recipe calls for a 'dash of salt', I replace it with
| 'exactly 1 tbsp of salt' or 'no salt necessary'.
| benjaminjackman wrote:
| > the ambiguity of description means that ten different chefs
| could follow the recipe and have ten different results.
|
| I wonder if a similar analog is sheet music. Ten different
| musicians could follow the sheet and produce 10 different
| sounding results.
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| You're really not going to be happy with this site then. Even
| basic things with hard numbers for measuring can be wildly off.
| Here's an easy example
| https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Apple_Pie_I This recipe
| calls for 2.5 cups of sugar for 1 pie. If you add that much
| sugar to a single 8" pie, it's going to be nearly inedible. You
| can easily find other recipes that only use 0.75 cups per pie(a
| little low in my opinion).
|
| With such a huge margin of error for just one ingredient it
| immediately makes me wonder if anyone _actually cooked this_
| before they wrote an article about it.
| mjparrott wrote:
| Very well articulated! I've thought about this before too.
| There is an assumption of having a "baseline knowledge and
| skill set" to be able to use most recipes. If you're really
| starting from scratch (like I was a few years ago), the best
| thing you can do is to start trying and failing. I take
| meticulous notes on the things I cook to help me learn and
| improve.
|
| Take your example of heat on a pan. I've always wanted a stove
| where I can control the BTUs with a dial. You could test your
| own stove for it and calibrate yourself for example.
|
| There is a slightly more scientific blog here, but it won't
| satisfy what you're looking for I don't think. I've never found
| that depth, but would appreciate it too!
| https://www.seriouseats.com/
|
| I like this book too:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab
| bradford wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check those out!
|
| I'd also like to mention cooks illustrated (they are online
| at https://www.cooksillustrated.com/, but my primary
| experience is with the printed magazine form).
|
| I don't know if I'd call them 'scientific', but I like the
| detailed accounting of the authors expectations, along with
| failed attempts and adjustments.
|
| It's not _completely_ what I 'd like to see in a recipe book
| but I think it's the closest example that I can think of.
| AlanYx wrote:
| I agree that Cook's Illustrated and its two sister
| publications, America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country,
| are pretty good examples of what you want. They have a lot
| of standardized elements that they don't always make clear
| to casual readers. For example, 1 onion in CI is actually
| standardized to one cup of chopped onion, they use a
| standard brand of Kosher salt and provide conversion ratios
| for brands with different crystal structures, etc. I get
| recipes from a variety of sources, but I do find that this
| kind of precision helps with getting repeatable results.
| Amygaz wrote:
| Oh you should try beating a white egg and then folding it with
| the other ingredients
| blowski wrote:
| I imagine it also depends on the onion itself, which is why you
| can't be more specific. My wife does an amazing job browning
| onions, but sometimes it goes wrong, and she can't explain why.
| Also, when I try copying her precisely, mine never seem to turn
| out as good so even if I did have precise instructions I might
| still struggle.
| andrewzah wrote:
| This is an example of people trying to use technology to fix a
| social problem.
|
| I don't know who is editing or curating these recipes. Taste is
| subjective. At least with Wikipedia, I can point X sources and
| back my claims up. On here, I could just add random family ad-hoc
| recipes and no one can really debate them. Which leads to: Mac n'
| Cheese 1. Mac n' Cheese 2.
|
| Traditional cookbooks solve a problem: people may not know any
| recipes (or want to learn new ones) and want a _curated_
| collection from a chef that knows what they 're talking about.
| Not random people online. Sure, books aren't guaranteed to be
| quality, but they're far less likely to be junk than random
| websites. They're even better if you only go by word of mouth-
| ask your parents/grandparents what they used!
|
| This wikicookbook idea doesn't solve any problems because it's no
| better than randomly searching "how to make tres leches cake" and
| picking some web page that had good enough SEO to get to the
| first page of duckduckgo.
|
| ---
|
| Things people actually want and/or need:
|
| * a website that matches (curated) recipes based on your
| ingredients. i.e. I can input "chicken bouillon, kale", and have
| it show me various recipes.
|
| * a standardized schema for recipes, i.e. in json. This way we
| can programmatically build apps, share recipes with friends, and
| maybe have browser/site integration.
|
| * a digital, open source collection of recipes _only_ from chefs
| /etc with credentials. aka a curated collection.
|
| * a website that parses said recipes and can display multiple
| types of units depending on your preferences.
|
| * a website/app that lets you bookmark recipes and automatically
| parses them with said schema. and lets you categorize/tag recipes
| so you can filter by "favorites" or "want to try", etc.
|
| Bonus points if your app can interface with Apple's Homepod /
| Alexa, etc, so I can confirm a recipe while I'm cooking or
| washing dishes. This is the biggest let-down by far for the
| homepod.
| mrob wrote:
| I usually solve this problem by averaging several recipes that
| look plausible. It's unlikely to give you the best version, but
| it will be good enough to let you decide if it's worth trying
| again. The 2nd attempt can be improved using general cooking
| knowledge.
| gabcoh wrote:
| Regarding a standardized schema for recipes:
| https://schema.org/Recipe
|
| I have no idea if this is in use anywhere or if any actual
| recipe service exposes this information, but there it is.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Heh, reminds me of this garbage:
|
| https://www.vintag.es/2018/11/honeywell-kitchen-computer.htm...
|
| "It was advertised as a machine for storing recipes and helping
| housewives in their daily domestic tasks. However, reading and
| introducing a recipe was a difficult if not impossible task as
| the computer had no display and no keyboard. It required a two-
| week course in order to learn how to use the machine."
| themodelplumber wrote:
| You can solve a lot of social problems with software though.
| For example, simply extending an existing interface to one that
| assists users in matching their subjective taste to others'
| subjective taste. Goodreads was well known for this. (Edit: I
| see the cookbook already has at least one subjective-
| qualitative enhancement in the form of the Featured Recipes
| list)
|
| Also we can be pretty critical here on HN but I see no reason
| why Wikibooks must be judged without reference to its potential
| --not only is it already helpful to some, for various reasons
| all along the long tail, but perhaps it's just a few tweaks
| away from even greater functionality. Critiques too often
| impart the idea that the current experience is lacking _and
| therefore_ needs complete replacement by e.g. "a website
| that..." when the existing efforts at least show potential in
| terms of humans being willing to work together productively
| toward building a generous resource. That's really something.
| andrewzah wrote:
| In this particular case, the resource has been around since
| 2004, and is part of the wikimedia network. So I highly doubt
| any of the wants I mentioned will get implemented if it
| hasn't already.
|
| A new website/app doesn't have to deal with old stuff so it's
| free to innovate its UX, ideas, etc. I also don't like the
| idea of not using existing work, but sometimes that's better
| than trying to adapt a system to do something completely
| opposite to its original goals.
|
| I don't intend to be quite critical, but as an amateur cook I
| just don't see the need for this. Traditional cookbooks +
| reading a book like Ratio by Michael Ruhlman will serve your
| time far better in my opinion.
| combatentropy wrote:
| > a curated collection from a chef
|
| Good point. In fact, with the risk of vandalism, this could be
| a recipe for disaster. On Wikipedia, vandalism may lead me to
| believe that the president of Russia is Taylor Swift, something
| usually harmless. Here, someone may vandalize a recipe to add 1
| cup of arsenic. Okay, more seriously, I wonder if there are
| subtle ways to mix normal ingredients into poison. I suppose
| this is already a risk on WikiHow, where someone could tell you
| to clean your house by mixing bleach and ammonia.
|
| What about a web of trust for some wikis? Instead of letting
| everyone edit a page, begin with the wiki's founder, who can
| delegate editor rights to people he knows, then they can grant
| the right to their friends, and so on. I have always loved the
| wiki format and prefer them at work over more draconian tools
| with complicated workflows. So I am surprised to hear myself
| saying this. But recently at work I have also been dealing with
| server certificates. So a web of trust is on my mind.
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| I don't see how this could ever truly compete with traditional
| cookbooks.
|
| I don't want to eat the exact same macaroni and cheese dish
| served on one side of the country that I can on the other.
|
| I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be
| standardized, nor should it.
|
| You cannot standardize the world's recipes into a monolithic
| volume like Wikimedia has done with facts.
|
| I mean you could, but the 7,000 variations on every chef's take
| on a Reuben sandwich would be a chore to sift through.
|
| Facts rarely change, tastes often do.
| mjparrott wrote:
| You can standardize things, if you are respectful of the
| concept that foods take on geographical characteristics and
| definitions. For example, the recipe for paella in Valencia,
| Spain is very specific. However, most of the world says "I want
| to make it however I like, I will call it Paella Valenciana
| anyways". It's right to customize and make your own versions,
| but it's wrong to not acknowledge the fact that true specific
| definitions do exist in certain cultures and geographies.
|
| Simple example, ever seen a Chicago style pizza? It would be
| impossible to create a standard "pizza" recipe that covers all
| pizzas ... but you can have a specific style with a name.
| Culturally, there are places in the world (for example France)
| that do treat food recipes this way. The US is too
| individualistic for this to be found "acceptable" culturally.
| derefr wrote:
| > I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be
| standardized, nor should it.
|
| Not that this is what is being attempted here, but rather than
| one or more recipes that each represents a particular set of
| curated choices, you could instead create a "recipe as
| multidimensional model" that captures the entirety of the
| configuration-space for "the food that is called X", where you
| can both adjust inputs and see how output parameters (e.g.
| saltiness, acidity, viscosity) will change, or constrain output
| parameters to find optimal input parameters.
|
| In other words, something like https://hur.st/bloomfilter/, but
| for tuning your chocolate-chip cookies.
| [deleted]
| kick wrote:
| _I don 't see how this could ever truly compete with
| traditional cookbooks._
|
| It can easily have the same recipes, and it doesn't need to
| compete, in the same way Wikipedia doesn't with traditional
| encyclopedias: when you take away commercial incentive,
| something can just exist.
|
| _I don 't want to eat the exact same macaroni and cheese dish
| served on one side of the country that I can on the other._
|
| Great! Looks like there are a few dozen options, and there are
| alternative recipes in some of these pages:
|
| https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=macaroni...
|
| _I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be
| standardized, nor should it._
|
| Wikis are descriptive, not prescriptive. This book seems to be
| so, as well, making no attempt at standardization. If you have
| thousands of Reuben recipes you want to input, why not?
|
| _You cannot standardize the world 's recipes into a monolithic
| volume like Wikimedia has done with facts._
|
| Wikipedia doesn't standardize anything. You totally can collect
| them; there are a bunch of cooking sites and applications on
| the internet, just as there are a bunch of sites that collect
| facts.
|
| _I mean you could, but the 7,000 variations on every chef 's
| take on a Reuben sandwich would be a chore to sift through._
|
| That's what curation is for, and there are plenty of people who
| search through Wikipedia, find interesting articles, and share
| them.
|
| _Facts rarely change, tastes often do._
|
| This makes a wiki the best possible place for recipes, then.
| Not only is there no hard-limit on the amount of content
| (storage is very nearly free, especially given Wikimedia's
| fundraising numbers), there's also version control history, and
| HTML has subheadings for variations on the same recipe that
| might occur over time.
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| Cookbooks as written by a single chef are generally
| suggestions and collections of similar tastes, not static
| lists of every single recipe under the sun.
|
| I regularly seek out cookbooks written by a handful of
| trusted chefs, and devour the information contained within
| them with great trust and pleasure.
|
| I don't just go to the library and take out all the cookbooks
| I can carry home.
|
| Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test
| every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about
| what's good for dinner, and then make that quickly for my
| family.
|
| Traditional cookbooks exist because most of us are not chefs
| and we don't know what goes good with what.
|
| If we did, we could easily make use of a cook's flavor bible
| which is essentially what this monolithic wiki-cookbook will
| become imho.
| Vinnl wrote:
| There are two points of relevance here, I think. The first
| is that yours is one way of consuming recipes, but another
| is to simply look for news recipe in different cookbooks
| or, increasingly often, find one at a random food blog. The
| second is that even collections are very much possible on a
| wiki, or even outside it, by just compiling links to the
| wiki articles. For example, I enjoy cookbooks written about
| a single cuisine (e.g. listing all kinds of Middle Eastern
| recipes together), because they will then often go well
| together. One could easily imagine a Wikibooks page
| compiling related recipes into a recommendation list.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| It does have facts too, as there are reference pages for
| ingredients and practices.
|
| As for recipes, I think a neutral recipe can be a good starting
| point for your learning journey. It would probably be better if
| they had more references to variations though, similar to
| Wikipedia's further reading.
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| >a neutral recipe
|
| What's neutral, though?
|
| There's no accounting for taste.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, despite the huge amount of variations, Wikipedia had a
| useful category for cocktails, and I never heard anyone
| complain.
|
| E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martini_(cocktail)
| dx87 wrote:
| It could be a good starting point for someone new to cooking,
| but it's up to individuals to experiment on their own once they
| feel comfortable.
| criley2 wrote:
| I agree that attempting to have one canonical recipe for
| something like "Macaroni and Cheese" is futile and counter-
| productive, but I don't think this project has to end up like
| that.
|
| For example, if the Macaroni and Cheese Cookbook page turned
| into an index for dozens of M+C recipes, named for the cultural
| influence or ingredient influence, that could certainly be
| useful.
|
| With the current state of recipes on the internet (most are
| extremely low quality click-bait designed around ad word
| integration for profit, for example, searching "instant pot
| recipes" returns just loads and loads of terrible monetized
| results) a source like this doesn't have to try terribly hard
| to be a high quality resource
|
| Even so it feels like it would be more useful as an
| encyclopedia of flavor than it would be for help making dinner
| tonight. Learning about the evolution of a dish would be very
| interesting, but I wouldn't trust an anonymous wiki editor very
| much in terms of actual cooking
|
| I think the biggest problem to me is that recipes are very much
| driven by personality. People learn a few chefs/sources that
| have produced good results for them, and they stick to those
| sources. They go buy the cookbooks from those people and stay
| in a safe walled garden where they can trust each recipe
|
| I think another big problem is the low quality of the recipe
| source. Traditionally listing ingredients with some steps along
| the way is sufficient for the experienced cook, but good modern
| recipes (to me) do so much more than list ingredients and
| steps.
|
| I follow a chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and when he breaks down a
| recipe (for Serious Eats or his books like The Food Lab) he
| goes so much more into WHY each decision was made, which
| empowers you to not just understand the decision but also
| change it.
|
| For example: The All-American Beef Stew
| -(https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/01/food-lab-follow-the-
| rule...) (and the short version
| https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/01/all-american-
| bee...) Every aspect of the dish is analyzed and discussed!
|
| Or Fuschia Dunlop's translation of Sichuan cooking for a
| western audience, (e.g.
| https://andrewzimmern.com/2013/03/28/fuchsia-dunlops-fish-
| fr...) she helps distill Chinese culture and the cooking of
| this region with a lot more than an ingredient list and a step.
| That information, delivered by a trusted expert, is vital to
| understanding and mastering a dish from a culture very
| different than my own.
|
| Why would I want some anonymously written/edited list of
| ingredients and steps when I can have a professionally
| produced, multi-media (huge useful step by step images AND
| video), "scientifically-inspired" discussion of the recipe and
| why it does what it does?
|
| That's the kicker for me, I'll always go back to Kenji or Alton
| or Fuschia or someone I trust because I know they have
| delivered good results and researched the recipe deeply enough
| to help me succeed not just at their version but at my own
| version too
| [deleted]
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| >For example, if the Macaroni and Cheese Cookbook page turned
| into an index for dozens of M+C recipes, named for the
| cultural influence or ingredient influence, that could
| certainly be useful.
|
| How could it possibly, though?
|
| I have cue cards I found in my old house when I bought it
| that have what's probably a local rendition of macaroni and
| cheese from the 1960s in Hamilton, Ontario...
|
| Can I somehow cite that and insert it into the mac and cheese
| section of the wiki cookbook?
|
| Or will this just become an digital amalgamation of every
| printed cookbook in the world? Using actual books as points
| of reference and citation?
| correct_horse wrote:
| I generally agree that this will never be as popular as
| Wikipedia. But when cooking, I rarely follow the recipe
| exactly. The existence of a standardized recipe does not imply
| a standardized dish.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| I agree. Recipes and food are about culture which obviously
| varies. What it would be good for is seeing a general look at
| what a recipe is. How do I make this sauce? What are the basic
| ingredients for chocolate cake? It probably won't ever capture
| the rich detail of using one technique/ingredient from a
| particular part of the world, but it's a starting point which
| someone can then look further into.
| flyGuyOnTheSly wrote:
| Exactly my line of thought.
|
| This wiki cookbook will do swimmingly with answering
| questions like "What is a roux?" or "How to deglaze a pan?"
| but it's going to have a hell of a time being used like a
| traditional cookbook filled with recipes as we all know and
| love them today.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I need a decent json schema for a recipe. There are some out
| there but they have problems. Can we all agree on a recipe json
| schema so we can put our recipes in json and share them and make
| apps on top of them? I'm talking a schema that has quantity that
| can be plugged into IoT devices.
| app4soft wrote:
| The only thing missed in _Wikibooks_ -- export to PDF is disabled
| now.[0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8yta9l/how_get_p...
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(page generated 2020-02-07 23:00 UTC)