Cooking from Pictures

Like I have previously mentioned modern cookbook writers use their pictures to show how to cook the dish step-by-step. In this entry I will compare the step-by-step process in a children's recipe with an adult's recipe, to see how the audience affects the recipe.

For this entry I chose to look at Joyce Dassonville and Ehren McDow's children's cookbook The Picture Cookbook: No-Cook Recipes for the Special Chef (2008).

Google eBook

Pictures in this cookbook are used to replace directions of how to cook but are a lot easier for the child chef. I chose to look at the recipe on Strawberry Shortcake...

Google eBook

It is clear that this recipe is for children as the pictures are simplified. These pictures are both entertaining and instructive. Nicola Humble suggests "the employment of pictures to break a recipe into a series of physical actions is recognition that cooking is a technical skill in which people need training." (60) The images here are more successful with the 'physical actions' because it is easier to copy when in 'training' than to read what you should do. However, when reading this I wanted to know... Can pictures do all the talking? Or do we need words? (Stay tuned for my next blog where I answer this).

In comparison to this, I came across the ingenious blog "Picture the Recipe". It is filled with wonderful photographs which will satisfy your hungry eyes. The author of this website, Noreen Hiskey, suggests "you eat with your eyes first" and with all the mouth-watering images she offers in her blog, it allows her audience to do just that. The difference between this and the child's cookbook is that it offers written directions and timings. This main difference occurs due to the different audiences because adults are more interested in perfecting the dish so words are offered. On the other hand, cooking for a child is just fun so perfecting the dish does not matter. In this cooking blog I chose a similar recipe to the one above to see how they differed.

This recipe is Raspberry Napoleon and it is set out here. 

picturetherecipe.com

In this recipe the words assist what she is saying in the pictures. The pictures are more informative than those offered in the child's cookbook, for example she shows the texture of the cream in her pictures. Humble suggests photographs in a cookbook "demonstrate stages of a recipe and(...) make clear any particularly technical aspect" (59) The whipping of the cream is somewhat 'technical' because the consistency is important to the whole of the recipe.

The main difference between the two cookbooks is that Hiskey's blog is interested in the realism of cooking food as she is cooking the recipe whilst talking us through how she is doing it. The introduction of words in her recipe confirms that this is more advanced than the children's recipe because the 'adult' cookbook is interested in timings and measurements. However, the pictures aim is very similar because their pictures assist the chef in getting the right outcome.

Work Cited

Dassonville, J. and Ehren McDow. The Picture Cookbook: No-Cook Recipes for the Special Chef. Granville Island Publishing (2008) Google eBook

Google eBook images “The Picture Cookbook” Accessed 15/03/2015

Humble, N. Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and The Transformation of British Food. London: Faber and Faber Limited. (2005)

Hiskey, N. “Standard Blog on Website” Picture the Recipe  www.picturetherecipe.com (2011-2014). Web. Accessed 13/03/2015