海角大神

One of the advantages of online recipe sites, as notes, is the vast ghostly army of reviewers who rate given recipes and give advice on how to tweak them.

It鈥檚 an advantage that printed cookbooks don鈥檛 have 鈥� hence a new social networking site, , trying to encourage users to list the cookbooks they own and rate individual recipes. It鈥檚 an interesting, inside-out twist on the tension between print and online.

If you are thinking about buying "Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics," for instance, one of the books most owned by Cookbooker members, you can see reviews of four recipes, all given four or five stars (out of five). Eight people weighed in with reviews of recipes from "The Moosewood Cookbook," all four or five stars except for the 3-star stuffed squash with apple filling (where the reviewer did honestly note that, 鈥淭ruth is, I don't like stuffed squash very much, and this only seemed average to me.鈥�)

PW noted that that the site has a few hundred registered members so far, and that its success 鈥渨ill, like most of the Web, [depend] largely on the masses joining in.鈥�

"Mark Bittman鈥檚 "How to Cook Everything" features some 2,000 recipes, but only 23 of them appear on Cookbooker. There are no recipes reviewed from the new and popular "Gourmet Today," "Momofuku," or "The Pioneer Woman Cooks"; other timely titles, such as "So Easy" by Ellie Krieger and "My New Orleans" by John Besh aren鈥檛 even listed (though it鈥檚 easy for users to add them)," said the article.

Even as the site grows, though, I鈥檓 not sure it鈥檒l be one for me. What I鈥檝e found with my cookbooks over time is that most are either keepers or they鈥檙e not, the authors either match my tastes pretty well or they don鈥檛. A review of the whole book 鈥� which is already readily available 鈥� is more useful to me than a recipe-by-recipe critique.

It鈥檚 possible that I鈥檝e made a dud recipe from "Joy of Cooking" (although if I have I don鈥檛 remember it), but I鈥檇 already be inclined to give its cranberry sauce or banana bread a test run based on its overall good record in my kitchen. The fact that two Cookbooker reviewers gave those recipes a thumbs-up doesn鈥檛 change my feelings one way or another. It also seems unlikely that any single recipe, given the hundreds of options in most cookbooks, would accumulate the critical mass of reviews that makes the recipes on online sites so valuable. If 25 people loved a particular cranberry sauce, or felt it wasn鈥檛 up to the book鈥檚 usual standards, that might sway me.

But overall, Cookbooker just convinces me that published cookbooks have a place all their own, apart from recipe sites. Even when they鈥檙e collections of recipes, without lengthy narratives or teaching tools, they have a collective weight that makes them something more.

Rebekah Denn blogs at eatallaboutit.com.