Last week, New York Times Cooking celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its incredibly successful cooking app. In truth, the app's success was more like 20 years in the making. The Times had wanted to digitize its vast recipe archive since the early 2000s, but due to a lot of internal to-ing and fro-ing (something the Times specializes in), it took more than a decade to take the leap. The extended maceration has proven worthwhile—they got it right. They understood their readership's long held desire for inspiration, recipes they can trust, and a place to be heard about it. The app shines not only because of the breadth and quality of its content but because of the wacky and endearing commentary from its readers.
It may seem odd to highlight one of our competitors, but Food52 owes some of its origin to the Times (where I worked for 11 years), and I've always believed in rising tides and all that. I was working on The Essential New York Times Cookbook, a compendium of the most noteworthy recipes from the Times's 170-year-old archive, when Merrill, my co-founder, and I decided to start Food52. One of our inspirations was the Times's bountiful recipe coverage from the 19th century: It was generated almost exclusively by readers. As part of my research, I'd also put a notice in the Times asking readers for their "most-stained recipes." I received thousands of detailed and colorful responses, many of which are sprinkled throughout my book.
These two signals—the desire for home cooks to have their recipes celebrated in a respected publication and then to be able to chat about their cooking experiences—helped shape Food52.
NYT Cooking hasn't yet embraced publishing its reader's recipes; it sticks to recipes and resists having an aesthetic or point of view about lifestyle, or getting into how recipes fit into a larger whole, with products and other home content. Those are the things that we do! There is room for both approaches. I'm a loyal NYT Cooking fan. Maybe you are, too. But you're here for something else.
Now, before I lose my job, let's move on to some of those other things that you come here for:
Such as one-of-a-kind ceramics:
