Opinion Is that cookbook obsolete?

The interface of a tablet offers possibilities to the cook that would be impossible with a laptop,let alone a book. Swiping,tapping and zooming through information presented in multimedia is a good match for the experience of cooking,which involves all the senses and the brain,as well. And when those faculties fail,as often happens in high-stress kitchen scenarios like Thanksgiving,apps can come to the rescue with features like technique videos,embedded glossaries and social media links.

Bob Huntley wrestled with the limitations of the written recipe before founding his Houston-based software company called CulinApp. In the 1990s,Huntley had little time for cooking; he was busy building the network for Doom,the first international online gaming network. But after he sold that business and retired to a ranch with his pet longhorns and a custom-built data line,he tried teaching himself to cook from cookbooks and online recipes. It didn’t work. “I struggled with getting the whole recipe downloaded into my head,” he said. “I would read the whole thing through,but pieces kept falling off — I needed a buffer,” he explained,using a term for large caches of downloaded data that make a program run smoothly. “I kept having to go back to the page,and the interface was so difficult to manage.”

Huntley was becoming restless in retirement around the time Apple’s iPad was coming on the market. Accustomed to inventing alternate realities,he developed ways of presenting recipes on a screen. These strategies can be disorienting at first,but make enormous sense. Users can choose from different ways of seeing each recipe. For novice cooks,a step-by-step view presents each recipe step in full screen,with a video. Huntley also developed CulinView,a nonverbal way for a more confident cook to follow a recipe. After ingredients are measured and the oven heated,the rest of the process is shown in a flow chart,illustrated with bright images of mixers,whisks,ovens and ingredients. With arrows and color-coding,it sketches out the process for the more confident cook. For the traditionalists,there is the Cookbook view,formatted in the old-fashioned way.

Many developers say that recipe animation,either employing stop-frame photography,line drawings or infographics,is the future of digital cooking instruction. Video,on the other hand,while it can be valuable for bringing a personality into the kitchen,has several drawbacks. It is expensive to produce,and eats up precious memory.

Cookbooks have long offered their own kind of enriched content,in the form of scribbles left in the margins by cooks who found they liked a little extra cinnamon,or a higher oven temperature. As it turns out,there’s an app for that,too.

Since the 1970s,arriving students at the Culinary Institute of America have been issued essential tools of the profession: chef’s whites,a set of knives and several heavy cookbooks. As of next June,they will also need a tablet loaded with the institution’s new app,The Professional Chef,a complete digital edition of the basic textbook the institute has published since 1962. In addition to reference materials and video,the app brings in networking ability and social media.

Nick Ahrens,a fresh-faced recent graduate who helped develop the app,was using it on the school’s campus last week to practice vegetable cuts,zooming in to compare his julienne carrots to the ones on the screen. Behind him,a current student,Alexis Lockwood,was feeding a wide ribbon of pasta dough through a roller,adroitly using one hand to hold it and the other to back up the video on her iPad,until the pasta maker’s handle fell off.

“There’s only so much you can get from process shots,” Ahrens said smoothly,referring to the step-by-step photography that,in a book,provides the most detailed representation possible of a recipe. “You can’t hear the onions sizzling in the pan,or how to move your knife through a salmon fillet,or see how to put your pasta machine back together in a book.”