The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.

Yummly’s API, though, isn’t just a Punchfork clone, said Brian Witlin, the search portal’s new head of platform and mobile. Punchfork aggregated content from member food blogs and organized its recipes on social principles. Yummly on the other hand delves deep into the ingredients, cooking methods and the science behind each of the recipes it categorizes. It teases nutritional data out of its recipes, and its algorithms can even infer if a particular dish will be spicy, bitter or sweet. Users, for instance, can use Yummly to search specifically for low-fat or gluten-free dish options or find meals guaranteed to blow the socks off even the most jaded spice fiend.

“There are so many ways we can slice and dice the data we have,” Witlin said. “We plan to offer even more options in the next couple of months.” Yummly, however, doesn’t yet have tools to replace the social context Punchfork provides its customers, but Witlin said it’s in the works.

Initially customers most likely will use the Yummly API to provide more generic recipe content and search in their sites and apps. One of Yummly’s early API testers, search engine DuckDuckGo, uses the API to answer specific recipe queries, basically extending Yummly’s search portal onto its own site.

But developers will eventually be able to tap into Yummly’s technology to make their recipe and cooking services smarter. For instance recipe aggregation apps such as Evernote, Paprika and BigOven store recipes scrapped from all over the web, most of them drawn from the same sites Yummly categorizes. Those companies could use Yummly’s API to organize their customers personal recipe boxes into much more useful categories.

Instead of sorting your recipe library by generic soup, salad, meat and poultry labels, you could sort them by calorie level, salt use, level of spiciness or any of hundreds of different categories that aren’t spelled out in the recipes themselves.

Of course, Yummly can only sort the recipes it catalogs so any recipe you enter manually or from a site Yummly doesn’t aggregate won’t benefit from the API. But Witlin said Yummly eventually plans to amp up its recipe parsing technology so it will immediately scan any new recipe it encounters, adding it to its database.  When that happens, there won’t be any recipe Yummly can’t categorize, Witlin said.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user lilivanili

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“When you’re in the restaurant and you see a dish go by you’re like, ‘Wow, I want that,’ and you don’t  really need 20 data points to know,” said Gojee CEO Michael LaValle. “Most of the web is so text and data-oriented, and we don’t think it’s necessarily the ideal way that people make decisions around emotional things.”

And when you start browsing the beautiful dresses and shoes on Gojee, the addition of the new vertical starts to make more sense (although taking the plunge for Louis Vuitton shoes is a little pricier than buying ingredients even for the nicest steak dish.) Gojee’s new verticals are mostly high-end items from brands like Marc Jacobs, Herve Leger, Chanel, as well as a few other more obscure brands. Most of the items are at least several hundred dollars, and many are in the thousands.

“When a girl walks into Louis Vuitton to look at shoes, she generally knows how much they cost, she doesn’t care if they’re made in Thailand or France, and she knows she’ll like it. So she’ll look at the shoes and be like, ‘This is what I want.’ She doesn’t need to read three pages on the shoe,” LaValle said.

Gojee’s visual nature is often compared to that of Pinterest, LaValle said, but sometimes the experience of hunting through items on Pinterest can feel like looking for “diamonds in the rough.” So by limiting items to high-quality items, Gojee ensures that there’s a better chance users will like what they see, and the site can comfortably highlight individual images without crowding the page for density.

He also noted that no, the beloved food and drink sections aren’t going away — so users who love them have no need to worry. And looking forward, he hopes to expand into other categories like men’s fashion, home decor, and others. The site just launched its mobile apps in September, and the new verticals will fit on those platforms as well.

From a business perspective, it’s not clear that the site is focused on making sales right away — presumably there aren’t that many people who make $73,000 jewelry impulse purchases. But Pinterest has proven that if you can attract plenty of attention and eyeballs on your site, monetization is never far off on the horizon. (LaValle noted that they’ve had a variety of high-end liquor brands asking to advertise on the site’s food and liquor verticals.) So can Gojee make a name for itself amid the multitude of other fashion discovery sites out there? Remains to be seen. But until then, happy browsing. (Just maybe steer clear of the lingerie section while you’re at work.)

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In fact, the week before Thanksgiving Allrecipes recorded 12 million sessions from a mobile browser or app, up 97 percent from the same week the previous year. Home cooks aren’t just using the internet as a valuable culinary tool, they’re using their smartphones and tablets to bring that tool directly into kitchen. They aren’t just searching for recipes either. They’re often looking for instructions on cooking techniques. That week 1.6 million visitors watched instructional videos on the Allrecipes sites, an increase of 200 percent over last year.

Allrecipes wasn’t the only online cooking resource to have a big Thanksgiving. Crowdsourced recipe portal Food52 saw inquiries to its Hotline mobile and web cooking questions app jump 147 percent the week of Thanksgiving as compared to its usual traffic levels. Its recipe page views increased 82 percent for the same period.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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For most of us, Thanksgiving is about football, beer and arguing politics with Uncle Mike. But for the cook in kitchen, it can be an extremely stressful ordeal. Preparing a huge meal for a dozen people on a tight timeline is hard enough as it is, but doing so under the critical gaze of your mother-in-law and with kids are scurrying underfoot, it can be impossible.

Luckily there’s help on the other side of your PC, tablet or smartphone screen. Here are three apps that can help ease the stress of creating a holiday meal and might even help you avert a Thanksgiving culinary catastrophe.

Food52 Hotline

Last November, hundreds of home cooks gave thanks to Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs and the gaggle of dedicated cooks at Food52. Together the group saved a lot of holiday meals from disaster with a service called Hotline, which you can think of as digital version of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, except its scope isn’t limited to the preparation of oversized poultry.

You can ask Hotline a question by posting on the Food52 website, via its iPhone app or by tweeting directly at the @food52hotline Twitter account. The format allows you to ask detailed questions about general cooking topics or specific recipes. Food52 editors will parse the questions and forward them to the site’s contributors based on fields of expertise. Chances are, one of Food52’s 50,000 crowdsourced contributors will get back to you within the half hour. If you mark the question as urgent (i.e. you’re eyeing the fire extinguisher), you may hear back within minutes.

Anyone looking for a little extra help may want to invest in Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, an iPad cookbook app that pretty much breaks down every aspect of hosting a holiday party and cooking dinner into all of its component parts. The recipes are not only detailed, but the techniques are illustrated with photos, diagrams and often how-to videos. What’s more, if you run into a problem, you can access Hotline right from the app.

CookingPlanit

So you’re a neophyte in the kitchen, but for some reason you agreed to host Thanksgiving this year. You don’t just need recipes and advice, you need someone holding your hand in the kitchen. You might be the ideal candidate for Cooking Planit, a new culinary app available for the iOS devices that is pretty much the closest thing you can get to a digital cooking assistant.

CookingPlanit guides you through every aspect of meal planning from shopping for groceries and prep work to timing your roast’s stay in the oven. It doesn’t matter how inept or careless or distracted you are, Cooking Planit doesn’t leave anything to chance. It even tells you when to take breaks.

The Austin-based startup launched only this summer so it’s building up its recipe library and features. Right now, its biggest drawback for holiday meal planning is it can only scale recipes to six servings, so if you’re planning on hosting a big dinner, you might want to give Cooking Planit some time to mature.

That said, if you’re looking to start out small and simple, CookingPlanit’s in-house chef Emily Wilson has prepared two simple Thanksgiving menus (though neither includes a whole roast turkey). The app allows you to mix and match recipes to create your own menus. The cooking assistant then crunches the ingredients and instructions to create a detailed shopping list and dinner-day game plan. You just need to show up and do what your iPad tells you to do.

BigOven RecipeScan

Meals don’t get any more traditional than Thanksgiving dinner, and that means a lot of us are cooking from old family recipes that are hand-printed on index cards, jotted down in notebooks or scrawled in the margins of cookbooks. BigOven’s RecipeScan service can’t improve upon those recipes, but it can produce digital versions, making the Thanksgiving grocery shopping, meal planning and cooking a lot easier.

BigOven does this not through fancy algorithms or handwriting-deciphering software; rather it uses Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourced internet labor marketplace. Basically BigOven is hiring people to translate your chicken scratch handwriting into digital text as well as into semantic food data that Big Oven’s recipe aggregation and meal-planning engine can parse. BigOven will convert any recipe you capture with its iPhone, Android or Windows Phone app, even if you snap a photo out of a magazine or cookbook. You can then combine your recipes with other digital recipes from BigOven’s libraries and those you “clip” from Websites into a universal recipe box.

The first three scans are free, after which customers can buy scans in bundles or at 59 cents a pop. Since human labor is involved, the process takes a few days, so it’s bit late to digitize this year’s Thanksgiving menu, but it’s never too early to start planning next year’s.

Poultry image courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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In its Measuring Cup online poll, the cooking site found that 35 percent of online cooks used smartphones to look up recipes. While recipe research was by far the most common smartphone activity, cooks are using the handheld gadgets to do a lot more inside and outside the kitchen: 29 percent said they have used their phones to photograph finished dishes, 18 percent created digital shopping lists with apps like Grocery IQ and Ziplist, 16 percent redeemed digital coupons at the grocery store and 12 percent used the phone to share a recipe on a social media site.

The number of people using smartphones to watch cooking videos is still small at just 15 percent, but on the PC and tablet, streamed video has exploded among women (Many of the poll results only include women since not enough men responded to form a suitable statistical sample).  Allrecipe’s first Measuring Cup report in 1999 found that 45 percent of women watched cooking videos online. In 2012, that number increased to 74 percent. Furthermore, nearly half of respondent believed that in 15 years how-to videos would become the primary media for conveying culinary knowledge – replacing Mom.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the report:

• The most popular digital culinary resources weren’t cooking portals like Allrecipes or Food Network, but search engines, according to 43 percent of online cooks. Recipe sites were a close second, though, at 42 percent. The number one search term, you guessed it, was “chicken”.
• Digital cuisine is a big business: citing eMarketer, Allrecipes said consumer packaged good advertising spend online is increasing from $134 million in 200 to a projected $3.6 billion in 2012.
• Allrecipes found that mindshare in online cooking is drifting to more general social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter. One third of female cooks polled said it was important that cooking portals keep up by integrating with those big social networks.
• Expectations are high that more of the shopping and meal planning process will become digital: a majority of respondents stated that in 15 years the paper coupon will become extinct, the digital wallet will replace the leather billfold and that groceries will be ordered online and delivered to the home.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the report, however, is its more subtle findings on how the digital media have changed our views of the hallowed recipe and cookbook. Paradoxically the internet has made finding recipes far easier but it’s also destroyed our faith in the recipe itself.

Forty-four percent of men and women polled named Cooking websites as their preferred cooking resource, compared to 19 percent who said cookbooks and 9 percent who said their parents. However, confidence in the recipe has degraded. In 1999, Allrecipe’s poll found that 73 percent of online cooks said recipes made cooking easier. In 2012, only 35 percent returned the same response.

The Internet may be democratizing cooking – anyone can circulate a recipe widely and anyone can publish a cookbook. But let’s face it, there are a lot of bad recipes out there, and there’s growing trend to emphasize the aesthetics of food over the quality of the recipes behind them (The study found that the top reason for sharing recipes online was “attractive photos”). Sites like Pinterest have made cooking an artfully presented aspirational pursuit, but in many ways it’s turned the internet into a gigantic coffee table cookbook – a collection of pretty pictures and lush descriptions backed up by unvetted, incomplete and often awful recipes.

As always, though, the internet will adapt. Not only have sophisticated online review engines helped distinguish good recipes from bad, many sites such as Food52 have emerged that take crowdsourced approaches to testing and refining recipes. Allrecipes itself has long allowed its community to customize any recipe submitted to the site, and in many cases those customized recipes have become more popular than the originals, according to an Allrecipes spokesperson. Maybe we can have our democracy, but also a little bit of quality control as well.

Allrecipes, which was recently acquired by Meredith, polled roughly 2,200 people, about half of which were Allrecipes members and the other half online panelists taken from other, often non-cooking, sites. Very few men participated in the poll, so on questions where more than 200 men participated, their results were included, the spokesperson said.

All graphics courtesy of Allrecipes.com

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Food52 founders Amanda Hesser (left) and Merrill Stubbs

When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom.

Since then Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook.

In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that anytime a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking website – or from a mobile app or social media site – and get an answer within minutes.

Food52 has already laid out the groundwork with a service called Hotline, which Hesser describes as the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line for any food question. Cooks can ask their questions from Food52’s Website, via Twitter, through its iPhone app, or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide. Anyone can respond, as well as agree or disagree with someone else’s answer, but most of the responses come from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks (who account for roughly 10 percent of its 500,000 monthly unique visitors).

“Right now it’s a very solid proof of concept within our world, but you can imagine how powerful this could be if we integrated it with other sites,” Hesser said. “We want to distribute what we do around the Web. We’re building a widget that can be embedded in food blogs and sites that would expand our reach to a much wider audience.”

Whole Foods Market is already experimenting with the platform, incorporating the Hotline into a series of local food portals it’s launching across the country, rebranding the service as FoodPickle. Food52 isn’t working with any other companies or sites just yet. First, Hesser said, it needs to refine and scale its platform.

The recipe for the ultimate repository of cooking knowledge

Currently Food52 is only getting about 20–40 questions per day — though during the holidays volumes increase dramatically — a number that’s easily handled by its membership and moderated by the startup’s small staff of eight. In order to support what it eventually hopes will be thousands of questions per day, Food52 is developing an automated system for streamlining the Q&A and process, identifying which questions pertain to a particular field of cookery and pushing those queries to the relevant experts among its members. For instance, a question about a particular sourdough bread recipe would not only go into the overall question feed but would also be automatically pushed to the recipe’s author and Food52’s baking cognoscenti.

Ultimately, Hesser said, Food 52 wants to get every query answered in as close to real time as possible, because people most often have cooking questions while they’re actually cooking. A 20-minute response lag to the question “How do I know when my quiche is done?” doesn’t do you much good if your quiche is already burning.

“Over the Christmas holidays we saved a lot of meals,” Hesser said, but she added that Food52 can do better. “One challenge for us to get that critical mass of activity necessary to get questions answered in less than 5 minutes.”

Next, Food52 is trying to refine how questions are asked. While users can submit general hotline queries via its Web and app tools, Food52 is embedding code into its recipes pages that allows customers to ask questions about specific ingredients, techniques or steps described within those recipes. The engine then loads that relevant information into the posted question itself, making it easier for Food52’s members to provide specific answers. Hesser said Food52 will eventually expand those capabilities to its partners.

Food52 is also building a database of questions and highly rated answers, giving users instant access to a repository of stored knowledge about particular recipes or techniques. The more people use Hotline, the smarter it becomes, Hesser said. And finally, the startup is looking to take advantage of its higher-profile members to provide both authority and nuance to some of the more complex queries fielded by the site. Food52 has designated a group of 10 famous chefs, food writers and cookbook authors such as Michael Ruhlman and Dorie Greenspan as “MVPs.”

“There are a lot of fantastic food questions out there, but some of these questions require experience to answer,” said Hesser, who is no slouch herself (she authored the Essential New York Times Cookbook). “A lot of questions don’t have simple fact-based answers . . . The idea isn’t that what [the MVPs] have to say is necessarily more important than what others have to say, but we do want to add their knowledge to the conversation.”

Hesser didn’t reveal any details about the business model behind Food52’s expansion across the Web, though she did say the plan isn’t to provide a white-label service to other food brands. The New York City–based startup hopes to make Hotline its own pervading presence, drawing more people into the Food52 universe.

Food52 may also face some competition. In a recent conversation, Food Network’s SVP of online brand brands, Bob Madden, said FN is looking to make some big moves in its digital content strategy, including a possible cooking question-and-answer service of its own.

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So ZipList changed tack. Last summer it began partnering with big food brands MarthaStewart.com and the Daily Meal, as well as small food blogs that began integrating the ZipList recipe box directly into their sites. The results were impressive: In nine months it signed up 120 big-name food sites and 6,500 small blogs, which in turn generated 1 million customer accounts for its digital recipe and shopping list service. This week, it plans to launch its recipe box with one of the giants of online cuisine, Simply Recipes, a cooking site that boasts 7 million unique visitors per month.

“It’s hard to build your own brand name in the face of these powerful consumer-focused food sites,” Allen said. But ZipList could give those sites something they weren’t able to create on their own, he said. “If you look at all of them, they’re a mess — not just the blogger sites. It’s the biggest ones, too. There is really no taxonomy to how the organize recipes and ingredients. We were able to provide that taxonomy.”

Unlike the recipe boxes that the food sites typically offer their customers, ZipList’s isn’t locked in silo. Once you save a recipe or a shopping list on MarthaStewart.com, for example, it appears in your box even if you access it on Simply Recipes and vice versa.  The idea, Allen said, was to create a recipe box and notepad that travel with you as move through the culinary universe on the Web instead of forcing you to go to a specific app or Web portal to access the content. ZipList provides its own destination Web portal and iPhone and Android apps (an iPad app is in development), but most of its customers are accessing their recipe boxes through its partner sites, Allen said.

So far, ZipList has indexed 350,000 recipes, which have been clipped by its customers 4 million times. Those recipes generate targeted ads, the revenues from which ZipList splits with its partners. The recipes are being converted into shopping lists at a rate of 4 items for every recipe stored, and those lists are driving use of ZipList’s mobile apps as customers access their lists while shopping for dinner.

Finding common ground in online food

I have written in the past about the difficulties of creating a universal online recipe library and the need for a common digital recipe media format. ZipList doesn’t solve either problem completely, but it goes a long way to bridging the disconnect between the people creating recipes and the services that organize them digitally.

Recipe box services such as Hindsight Labs’ Paprika, HungrySeacow’s YummySoup and Pepperplate all have wonderful tools for scraping, storing and organizing recipes you find on the Web, but there’s a natural friction between the food sites and those aggregators. As recipes are whisked off to online or app-based storage lockers, they no longer generate page views, and customers have less incentive to engage with the food site itself.

Cooking community portals like KeepRecipes have tried to bridge that gap by encouraging its members to engage and even purchase content from recipe creators, creating an iTunes for cookbooks, but ZipList goes further by keeping content local. While it stores metadata such as ingredients and measurements to make searching and generating shopping lists easier, customers are ultimately interacting with their recipe boxes within the ZipList’s partner sites, not apart from them.

If ZipList continues to grow it also might wind up being a catalyst for creating a common language for food on the Web. ZipList encourages its partners must to render their recipes in hRecipe or Schema.org’s recipe formats optimized for digital search and discovery. (Update: Like other recipe box services, ZipList has also developed indexing algorithms that scrape unstructured recipe data when those formats aren’t used.) Consequently thousands of blogs and hundreds of big food sites are translating recipes from mere text floating in the Web into clearly identifiable and parsable digital data, something they have never had any incentive to do. ZipList uses that data to manage its customers’ recipe collections, but everyone benefits, as that information can be accessed and sorted by any app or search engine.

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Screenshot of Foodie (click to enlarge)

Glam Media, the online media company that produces content and serves ads for a primarily female audience, on Thursday is launching a new website Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. Social networking features will be built into the new Foodie website, making it the first site from Glam that deeply incorporates the technology acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011.

A launch with great expectations

In an interview this week, Glam CEO Samir Arora said he expects Foodie to very soon become one of his company’s top most highly trafficked sites. “One year ago, we discovered that our top ad category in revenue during the first quarter of 2011 was food. We didn’t even have a dedicated food category at that time,” Arora said. “That really drove us to sequence Foodie as an important launch.” Glam expects Foodie.com to attract 10 million monthly uniques soon after it debuts — a very impressive draw by most standards.

At launch, Foodie will feature content from prominent chefs, restauranteurs, established food critics and bloggers, and ads from companies including Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia. The real key news about the site, though, is that readers of Foodie will be able to fill out complete social profiles to let them interact with each other and Foodie’s content creators and brands. Glam describes Foodie.com like this: “A full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.”

Still an appetite for social media

But will people really want to create yet another social media profile? Glam certainly thinks so. According to CEO Arora, that’s because sites like Facebook are just too general to help us connect with our individual interests like food. The people with whom you’re friends on Facebook may not be the same people with whom you’re interested in sharing recipes. “When I connected my Facebook graph to my Yelp account, I found that I have nothing in common with my friends in terms of our restaurant tastes,” he said.

It’s a fair point — as popular as general social networking sites have become, people still go to specialized content producing sites on the web. Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph is trying to turn Facebook into a central place where people can customize their ideal web experience content and all, but perhaps people will still want to keep separate online niches where they deal with people who align with them along very specific interests. Foodie.com wants to be the place people go to read and connect with like-minded people about all things culinary.

Food may be just the beginning

Arora said this push toward social was always the direction in which Glam planned to go, and that the Ning acquisition which closed in December accelerated the process. “Otherwise, if we had to build it ourselves, we’d probably take five years.” If Foodie is the success it’s expected by the company to be, other verticals in Glam’s portfolio could go the social route as well.

It’s an ambitious move to make, but Glam already has such a massive audience — 220 million unique visitors a month, 90 million of them in the United States — that if anyone besides Facebook is going to turn itself into a totally social content web destination, it’s them.

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While the Web and other digital technologies have greatly amplified our exposure to new foods and cuisines, how we store, organize, and sort that wealth of culinary data remains practically unchanged. Recipes are still largely isolated on the Web, either residing on Websites, trapped in e-cookbooks or buried within a plethora of cooking apps. They’re no different than the cookbooks sitting on my shelves or the hand-scrawled recipe cards in a recipe box – each self-contained and isolated from the recipes or recipe collections around them.

What’s needed is a standard recipe media format that can be shared between applications and the Web. Like the MP3 or ACC format used in music, a recipe needs to become a standardized digital good, one that can be bought, sold, shared, edited and annotated. A recipe file could be rights-protected or it could be DRM-free, but ultimately it would have to be readable by any recipe application, browser or e-book reader.

Testing the limits of today’s recipe tools

Last month, I experimented with creating a digital recipe library using a few of the most popular recipe aggregation apps and Web portals, but I found that piecing together all of the different recipes available online into a coherent collection was a practical impossibility. KeepRecipes, Paprika, MacGourmet, and numerous other services all scrape recipes from Webpages and turn them into neatly cataloged recipe files. While all of them can easily grab recipes from the most commonly sourced cooking sites such as the Food Network or Epicurious, they all fail to identify and capture recipes outside of those big food portals. Most cooking blogs – where a lot of truly innovative cooking resides – might as well not exist to those apps.

KeepRecipes co-founder Phil Michaelson said this is a universal problem for any recipe aggregation tool because there’s no standard format for recipe markup on the Web. KeepRecipes can’t grab a recipe if it can’t identify it as one or distinguish between the ingredients, measurements and directions sections on the page.

The big food sites are more easily deciphered because they have all adopted the recipe markup formats promoted by Google and Facebook. Called hRecipe, the microformat provides a common language for search engines and other Websites to index and interpret recipe data. Recipe cataloging tools like KeepRecipes can just as easily use those markup tags to build recipe files, Michaelson said.

But there is some resistance to the widespread adoption of those formats. Michaelson said in an e-mail:

What we need is for more newspaper Websites, recipe bloggers, and recipe search engines to embrace these markup languages.  We also need less toolbars and iframes around recipe content that disrupt sharing and parsing of Webpages. We see resistance to adding technology (that is, a recipe markup language) that doesn’t have a clearly predictable [return on investment].  Everyone from Tumblr.com and WordPress.com (which power many recipe blogs) to TheKitchn.com would empower recipe authors to publish using a recipe markup format if they could estimate the ROI.

According to Michaelson, KeepRecipes tries hard to provide that financial incentive to bloggers and big food sites alike. It will only scrape a full recipe after a member visits the Website on which it’s posted. Because KeepRecipes is also a cooking community portal, allowing members to share dishes, particular recipes have the potential of going viral, driving curious cooks back to the dishes’ sources.

But ultimately the concept of a recipe aggregator stands in the face of whatever business model a recipe publisher is using. Whether you’re the Food Network, a cookbook author, or a small-time blogger, you want to get to paid, whether it’s through advertising revenues generated by page views, selling e-cookbooks and individual recipes, or just simple recognition. If you make it easier to traffic in recipes digitally, those business models are threatened.

There’s money to be made in digital food

That’s the beauty of recipe file format. Like any other digital media it can be rights protected. Sure, there will be lots of cases of infringement, but every other form of media faces the same problem, and it’s always been easier to steal a copyrighted recipe than it is to pirate a song or movie. Today you can cut and paste a recipe from a website into an email or document or grab it with a digital notepad service like Evernote.

Adjusting business models to accommodate new digital recipe media would be easy for some. If you buy a cookbook, the publisher should allow you to download the complete library of recipes into any recipe management app, just like many music distributors have begun to encourage the revival of vinyl by packaging an album’s digital tracks with the analog record. E-cookbook publishers should do the same.

For Web-based recipe collections, the model may be a bit more difficult. An online subscription-recipe service like Cook’s Illustrated could extend its business model to include recipe downloads, allowing you to access and store its entire library as long as you are a paying member, just as Rhapsody does for music media. The New York Times and Food & Wine could make free downloads conditional on print or digital subscriptions to their publications.

Sites that depend on advertising might have difficulty making those revenue schemes work, but there’s plenty they can do to bring customers back to their sites, whether through video tutorials or recommendation engines. A food site also could charge a nominal fee to download a recipe, say 25 cents, rather than read it through the browser. Social networking recipe sites like AllRecipes.com could use paid downloads of recipe files as a way to distribute revenues among its members, creating an everyman’s recipe store.

Long live the cookbook!

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis declared that digital cookbook is a far more useful tool than the traditional printed-and-bound cookbook, and he had a pretty good example to back up his claim. Inkling publishes the digital version of the The Professional Chef, the Culinary Institute of America’s classic teaching cookbook. The shelf version is an imposing tome, but Inkling has done plenty to make Pro Chef accessible to a wider audience by stuffing it into the iPad and optimizing the cookbook for a digital medium.

Inkling laces its electronic pages with more than 100 video tutorials and other multimedia. It makes the cookbook endlessly and easily searchable in ways a standard cookbook index is not. You can annotate and bookmark favorite recipes, rather than scrawl illegibly on or dog-ear a bound page.

But a digital cookbook is still a book – you have endless amounts of flexibility within the application or e-book itself, but it remains isolated in the digital ether. No one cooks from a single cookbook, and no cookbook can claim it holds every recipe a home chef would ever need. Though Inkling has created an extremely versatile and useful tool, I would argue that by sticking with the e-book format Inkling saddled it with needless limitations.

A truly useful cookbook can’t be treated like a novel or a textbook. A cookbook is a collection of individual recipes as much as it is a self-contained work, just an album is made up of individual songs. Publishers need to distribute the parts as well as the whole.

I’m not advocating the demise of the cookbook here — far from it. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is an exhaustive compendium of classic recipes, but it’s also an expression of the philosophical and culinary conviction of its principle author, Julia Child. Larousse Gastronomique is replete with recipes, but it’s more an encyclopedia of cuisine and technique than a true cookbook. If digitizing our cookbooks means atomizing the art and science of cuisine into hundreds of thousands of non-contextualized recipes, then we will have lost a huge resource.

That said, the practical side of cooking is just as – if not more — important than its art. Everyone must eat and most of us have little time to cook. The Internet and other digital technologies have given us access to countless new dishes and methods for cooking. Now those technologies  just need to provide us with a way to organize that vast quantity of information so we can actually get down to the business of cooking.

Cookbook/iPod image courtesy of Flickr user LizMarie_AK

Good Housekeeping Cookbook image courtesy of Flickr user Lori L. Stalteri

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Allrecipes.com said it had its biggest traffic day ever on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The website saw more than 6.8 million visits from people who viewed more than 32.5 million pages of content. According to Allrecipes, that represents a 32 percent increase from the day before Thanksgiving 2010. For larger reference, typically the site sees some 24 million unique visitors over the course of one month.

And more people are looking for food-based content while they’re away from the desktop. Visits to Allrecipes.com from a mobile device during the three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were up 218 percent year-over-year, the company says.

Of course, this news could come in handy given Allrecipes’ current strategic situation. Last month, Allrecipes’ parent company Readers Digest announced plans to put the cooking site up for sale.

But regardless of the fact that Allrecipes is in play, there is definitely a larger trend at work here. For example, a new tablet-based cookbook produced by iPad textbook startup Inkling is selling like hotcakes: Earlier this month it became the third highest grossing iPad app worldwide. Meanwhile, new startups such as Foodily are solely aimed at making it super easy to find and share recipes with online contacts. With so many people looking to the web for recipes and cooking tips, there are certainly more food-focused technologies on the horizon.

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