Recipes and Crowdsourcing

We seem to be starting a new tradition with Christmas meals: try a new recipe for an interesting main dish! Last year we tried a leg-of-lamb roast that turned out well, so this year we attempted porchetta from the same source. It’s always a little exciting (um, nerve-wracking) trying out a brand new recipe when you’re inviting others over for dinner. However, potlucks help to mitigate potential disasters as the spread of food is good, and one isn’t solely responsible for providing nourishment. In fact we woke up on Christmas morning to be welcomed by ants in the kitchen! The colder weather brought them in, but they were undoubtedly also lured by the red velvet cupcakes made the night before. I sadly had to dump the dozen that the ants found, but thankfully they did not get the whole stash. And there was so much dessert brought by others that things worked out just fine.

I feel that the Internet has really improved the reliability of recipes. Back in the old days, if you were following a cookbook, it was even more nerve-wracking. You think you’re following the recipe and when you’re done, things don’t look anything close to the beautiful picture in the book. It’s unclear which steps were problematic. Now, thanks to crowdsourcing, you can read the comments of many folks who have attempted the recipe providing tips on things to watch out for, variations, substitutes, and more. Thanks to YouTube and other video sites, you can find step-by-step visuals on virtually any step you might encounter. Don’t know how to tie the pork belly into a log using twine? There are videos for that. (We watched it!) Here’s a picture of our final product. Our photography clearly does not look as mouth-watering as the source recipe, but I personally thought our first attempt was quite tasty!

This got me thinking about chemical synthesis. While I personally am not in the business of making new molecules (I just build them on the computer and calculate their properties and interactions), many of my chemistry colleagues do. Every so often, one of them will be remarkably pleased that repeating a synthesis from a paper worked exactly as the authors said it would. Clearly that doesn’t always happen. Synthesis can be fiddly (from what I understand). It seems that synthesis would greatly benefit by having a format similar to online recipes that allow everyone to benefit from the crowdsourcing. Practically all our journal articles are online. Why not have a special comments section that allows others to enrich the published recipe? I bet that would save many chemists time and money spent on chemicals. Pre-internet, the monograph series Organic Syntheses, would only have published syntheses that had been carefully vetted to be reproducible.

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry discovers scribblings in his second-hand Potions textbook that suggest improvements to the “published” recipe. Hermione, sticking to the official published versions, gets increasingly frustrated as Harry’s deviations yield better results. Shouldn’t one expect the official recipes to have been carefully vetted? Then along comes a maverick who improves the recipe, but the modifications don’t make it into the mainstream even after many years have passed. They are simply found scribbled inside a single copy of the book. It’s almost as if some obscure maverick had annotated his or her version of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with superb improvements on technique, that was then lost in obscurity in a second-hand bookstore somewhere. (Note to self: Look for scribblings in famous cookbooks found in second-hand bookstores.)

Why weren’t Snape’s improvements more widely known? Perhaps potions masters hid their secrets similar to the alchemists of old, or master beer brewers of today. If you made a superior brew that would corner the market (or allow you to charge the highest prices) you’d want to keep your “secret recipe” to yourself to maintain your competitive edge. Maybe Snape wrote a letter to Libatius Borage, author of Advanced Potion Making, but was ignored. After all, perhaps a greasy-haired kid who dabbled in the dark arts was not worth notice by a famous textbook author (who probably was himself a potions master).

So, would you share a secret recipe? I suppose it depends. Could someone make a profit somewhere from keeping or sharing that information? The rise of Linux suggests that there are viable models to the long-reigning proprietary “secret” approaches. Perhaps the Internet has tipped the balanced towards the sharers rather than the hoarders? Maybe it depends on the commodity and the community. I, for one, am glad that the food community shares!