Eat Tweet: the world’s first Twitter cookbook
November 4th, 2010 | Published in Fun stuff
In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child’s recipe for Boeuf Bourguignon stretches three pages. She explains how to make “one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man” with 12 paragraphs of instruction, including how to prepare the bacon lardons, brown the beef, simmer the casserole, skim the fat, and carefully season the dish.
Maureen Evans takes a different approach. Here’s how the UBC creative writing graduate recasts Child’s recipe:
Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon
Brwn,rmv½c lardon,
2lb beef, carrot&onion.
Flr,s+p. 8m@450°F; +2c pinot
&Stock/T tompaste/BqtGrni.
Cvr3h@325°F.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s because Evans has written it in a type of shorthand so that the whole recipe—including the name of the dish—doesn’t exceed 140 characters. This tiny recipe is just one of 1,020 that Evans has included in her new book, Eat Tweet: A Twitter Cookbook (Artisan, $18.95). As she notes in the intro, “Eat Tweet is the world’s first cookbook written entirely in Twitterese (save for the introductions).”
Condensing Child’s recipe was “really tricky”, Evans admits in a phone interview with the Straight. “It was challenging, but it was fun,” she says from San Francisco, where she’s attending a conference. “That’s why I’ve enjoyed this funny genre; it’s these challenges of, how much information can I fit into a text message? Just the title is over one-third of the space.”
Those familiar with Twitter know that the social-networking platform allows a maximum of 140 characters per message. Evans says she was the first person to tweet recipes, back in October 2007, under the handle @cookbook. To call her an early adopter is an understatement: her partner, Blaine Cook, who is also from B.C., was one of Twitter’s original programmers.
In 2006, after Evans finished her Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing and anthropology at UBC, she moved with Cook to San Francisco. While he worked on Twitter, she pursued poetry and freelance writing.
A cooking enthusiast, Evans started tweeting family recipes to her circle of friends. That grew into a community of followers, many of whom tweeted recipes back. She currently tweets to more than 37,000 followers.
Eat Tweet, which was published in September, consists of previously tweeted and new recipes, some of which have been modified from those of popular chefs such as Child. For example, it includes mini versions of Mark Bittman’s Beet Rösti and Vikram Vij’s famed lamb popsicles. The book has the breadth of an all-purpose cookbook, spanning salad dressings to soups, pastas to roasts, breads to desserts. But this is no Julia Child tome: the book is hardly thicker than two iPhones stacked atop one another, and is about the size of an average paperback.
So how does anyone make sense of those abbreviated instructions? Decoding them is half the fun. It assumes, however, a certain knowledge base. The book’s glossary—found in the book as well as at cookbookglossary.pbworks.com/—defines symbols and shorthand. For example, a slash (/), which means “and”, separates ingredients in a step. If no number is specified, the reader should assume the unit is one. So “mix c flr/T sug” means mix one cup of flour and one tablespoon of sugar.
Abbreviations include bkgsheet for baking sheet, tater for potato, and srv for serve. BqtGrni in the beef bourguignon recipe means bouquet garni, or a bundle of herbs.
Evans has written most of the recipes to serve three to four people, a yield she chose not for economy of characters but to reflect the needs of a modern household. She also includes recipes for holiday dishes, such as roast turkey and stuffing. Although these serve a larger crowd, the recipes never top 140 characters.
The articulate author tells the Straight she sees Twitter recipes as a kind of poetry. She says she contemplated every line break in the book, and although it “might be a little absurd”, she wanted the language to “sound like food”.
“I try not to crush the life out of things,” she says. “The language [of text messages] can be specialized and lingo’d to the point of not sounding like language anymore. Sometimes it sounds very mechanical or abbreviated. But when I have a couscous recipe, I want to tell people to drain and fluff, to steam and rest. Those I think are beautiful food words. I try not to butcher a good verb. And I try to leave the pleasure of cooking in the recipes, even though they’re so tiny.”
Thus, she chose not to abbreviate the word sauté, and uses olvoil rather than the more common EVOO. “I think that sounds dreadful,” she says of the term employed by Rachael Ray and others. “Olvoil sounds like olive oil, it looks vaguely like olive oil, and people will figure it out.
“It would have been a much simpler project if I was really just automatically condensing these things,” she adds. “In fact, I have friends who probably could have done that with a computer.” But for Evans, reducing recipes to their essentials is a form of expression.
“What I’m interested in is looking at ‘How can we be fully human and fully creative within extreme constraints?’” she says. “Overall, that’s my philosophy in life, is that we remain excellently human as long as we’re able to be creative and break ourselves out of any little box that we’re put into—including 140 characters.”
It also matters a great deal to Evans that her recipes work. She and family members tested the “overwhelming majority” of recipes, and others were “very carefully cross-researched creations”. And although she says she assumes that her readers have only a basic knowledge of cooking, she doesn’t think abbreviated instructions will hinder them. Rather, she sees the recipes as road maps.
“A good map is very clear and accurate but allows you to find your way to a personal experience of the destination,” she explains. Her recipes “give the reader a little more responsibility, but a lot more personal flourish. You’re not going to be intimidated by being told the shape that your vegetables have to be diced into.”
These brief recipes could also alleviate the fear of cooking, she says, by reducing “the level of hand-holding that a lot of cookbooks engage you in. It can feel intimidating, like it has to turn out ‘perfect’. I’m trying to bring people back to a sense that it’s an art form, and art has to be personal to be successful.”
Evans learned a flexible, creative approach to cooking growing up in Smithers, B.C. She relates that the northern community didn’t always have a large variety of produce available, so she cooked with whatever was in season. Because there wasn’t a reliable supply of fresh milk, she made do with powdered milk. And if a cookbook called for an unusual ingredient, she improvised.
“Sometimes you had to make substitutions,” she recalls. “You wouldn’t have that special magic-feather ingredient that would make exotic cuisine ‘authentic’. But it would still turn out and be delicious.…It allowed me to discover early on that cooking is very dynamic.”
That means a bit of making it up as you go along. “If something doesn’t taste right, add something.”
She sees her recipes as starting points for individual creativity. “No cookbook is going to ensure you cook perfectly every time,” she says, explaining that people learn by experience. “Cooking is a thinking process. It’s not imitation.”
It can also be a community activity, as Evans’s followers know. They send her feedback on her recipes and photos of what they’ve made via Twitter. In the coming months, Evans plans to create a forum for readers to share their cooking experiences on her website.
Until then, expression is limited to 140 characters.
Follow Carolyn Ali on Twitter at twitter.com/carolynali
- Eat Tweet by Maureen Evans
