Twitter has become an established platform for sharing ideas, stories, news and information – but recipes? Can you really cook a meal with only 140 characters explaining ingredients and method? Rosita Bolandtries out a new cook book that offers more than a thousand tweeted recipes
THE FIRST time I really paid attention to Twitter was about two years ago. It was the subject of a long article in the New York Times Sundaymagazine. I read it because "Twitter" was a mysterious word that I kept hearing in the US, where I was living at the time.
Reading the article, which had a clear sense of excitement about it, was like reading about a country which I had never heard of: Twitterland, if you like; how you entered it, and what you did there once on arrival. The one detail that remains fixed in my memory from that article is the journalist describing people’s tweets as “little pieces of pointillism.” I remember it because it has turned out to be true: small pieces of information that collectively added up to a far larger picture, both about the individuals and the wider Twitter community.
I signed up to Twitter about 14 months ago as @RositaBoland. I had a brief tutorial from a couple of patient colleagues, @shanehegarty and @fiona_mccann who set me up with an account. Then I was wandering in Twitterland by myself, following people, friends, organisations and publications that interested me, and some that were fantastically random and fun, like @big_ben_clock that tweets bongs on the hour, and which always makes me laugh, or @FakeAPStylebook which tweets clever fake style-rules for newspapers. “Use curly braces only for stories about barbershop quartets and moustaches,” is a typical recent tweet from this account.
There are also, it must be said, some rather odd people in Twitterland. There was the man in Indonesia I blocked several times who kept popping up under different user names, and who bizarrely followed only women called Rosita. But mostly, Twitter is a great place to read and post links to stories, images and videos you like. Sometimes, I post links to my own stories, in common with many other journalists. Occasionally, I’ve found interviewees via Twitter. Sometimes I riff about what’s going through my head, sometimes I join in the debate of the day, and sometimes I chat with others.
In some vague way, this exchange of information is more or less what I expected. What I did not expect from Twitterland was to make new friends. Or at least, that is what happened to me. In the months I’ve been using Twitter, I have made an entirely new network of friends; a network I value more highly than anything else Twitter had made possible for me. I first ran into most of these friends at book launches or after festival openings, when those attending would have tweeted their attendance in advance and we all went looking for each other in the crowds, or at specially-organised “tweet-ups” – where the Twitter community meet up.
Through Twitter, I met the incredibly talented women who collectively contribute to the @antiroom blog, who include its editors @sineadgleeson, and @urchinette (Anna Carey), and writers @junecaldwell, @edelcoffey, @EleanorFitz (Eleanor Fitzsimons), @BiddyEarly (Susan Daly), @AoifeKelleher and many others. There have been parties, ideas for the blog exchanged, friendships made.
But the first friends I made via Twitter were travel writer @charlieconnelly, science journalist @judearoo (Jude Leavy), court reporter and writer @abigailrieley and photographer @Aperture11 (Michael Stamp). We met about a year ago, in an ad-hoc tweet-up in a pub after a launch not long after I joined Twitterland. Since then, we’ve all had dinner in each other’s houses, shared our stories, and had many nights out together. There will be many more such meetings ahead, because these are four of life’s great people, and they are friends I already know I’ll have for a long time to come.
IT WAS THESE FOURfriends I decided to ask as guineapigs to a quirky dinner party on Saturday. Quirky because a new cookbook has just been published, called Eat Tweet, by Maureen Evans, otherwise known as @cookbook. Evans is the partner of Blaine Cook, who was, as her biography says "the original programmer on Twitter".
Her little book contains 1,020 recipes that all come in under 140 characters. My challenge was to cook a meal for friends I had met via Twitter using only these tiny minimalist recipes.
Eat Tweethas a foreword by Frank Bruni, a food writer for the New Yorker. Those are serious credentials. I leafed through the book, trying to get my head around the shorthand used in the recipes. There are several pages of translations. "M" is minute, "e" is each, "cont" is proceed to the next step, "+" is add, "~" is approximately. Etc. Arggh.
I soldiered on, and selected four recipes; a mango, lime, avocado and green leaf salad, “Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon”, and tiramisu, with mojitos to kick off the evening. I emailed all four recipes to my guinea pigs, minus the names, and asked them to guess what they would be consuming.
Then the fun began. If I have ever attempted in the past to make a beef bourguignon, I cannot recall. I am quite certain, however, that Julia Child used more than 140 characters in her original recipe. I read the instructions roughly 2,000 times. “Brwn,rmv1/2c lardon,2lb beef,carrotonion.Flr,s+p. 8m@450F; +2c pinotStock/T tompaste/BqtGrni.Cvr3h@325F.” Huh? My head started to ache rather hard.
Was it 2lb in total of meat, carrots and onions? In the event, I found myself in the supermarket staring at metric weights and bought all my ingredients by guesswork. At least I was able to find all the ingredients for the simple salad and the main. The “ladyfingers” required for the tiramisu had me hunting through five different shops in vain before I looked at my watch and realised if I was to “Cvr3h@325F”, I needed to get back pronto and start cooking.
I muddled through the beef bourguignon recipe like the Swedish chef of old from the Muppets. The kindest thing I can say about my efforts is that's it's unlikely I'll be starring in Masterchef any time soon. Since I had to abandon the tiramasu on account of not being able to source the key ingredient, I substituted it with the far superior choice of Mammy Boland's homemade whiskey-soaked Christmas pudding from last year, which was still in my fridge.
Then, I had the additional logistical problem of transporting a hulking big hot pot of stew and all the other ingredients across Dublin in a taxi to Abbi and Mike's house in Stoneybatter. Did I mention my own house has been occupied by builders since I bought it in May, and I have yet to spend a night there? Hence borrowing my friends' lovely Tardis-like house as the Eat Tweetdinner venue.
It is unlikely either I or the taxi driver will forget that fare any time soon, as we drove across Dublin with me squeaking at intervals while clutching the pot of stew grimly on my lap as we bounced over ramps and jerked around corners.
At Stoneybatter, the others tried to guess what they were going to be eating on the basis of the email I had sent earlier. They couldn’t. “Something meaty?” Charlie suggested gamely. “Mousse?” offered Jude. Mike didn’t even try to guess, although he confessed he had tried googling with no success. As for poor Abbi, she had acute tonsillitis and could only appear downstairs briefly: something they hadn’t wanted to tell me earlier in case I tried to cancel.
They tore the book apart while I mixed mojitos, forgetting to add the mint. “If you picked this up and didn’t know anything about Twitter, you’d think this was Twitter language,” Jude pointed out. “But people don’t write their tweets like that. They write proper sentences.”
"Who's it for?" Charlie and Mike wondered. How, they asked, had I found it to cook from? Honestly? A nightmare. Why force your brain to understand a recipe – any recipe, whether Marcella's Hazan's Roast Chicken with Lemons, pad thai, panna cotta or any of the other 1,017 recipes in Eat Tweet– when you can read the full recipe and see a picture in a traditional cookbook? The food I cooked was edible, or so my gallant friends assured me, but I could have undoubtedly done better with proper recipes.
But perhaps you, clever readers, can prove that it is in fact possible to write a clear and useful recipe in under 140 characters?
You ate what? Rosita’s menu
Mohito
Muddle1/4goldrumlime/2T SimpleSyrup/5sprg mnt/2dash aromaticbitters.Shake w ice; strain to highball of ice. Float w T rum.
Mango Avocado Salad
Compose3c mixdgreens/slicedavocado/c mango/T verbena or cilantro; top w whisked 2T olvoilhoney/T lime/s+p
Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon
Brwn,rmv1/2c lardon.2lb beef,carrotonion.Flr,s+p. 8m@450F; +2c pinotStock/T tompaste/BqtGrni.Cvr3h@325F
Tiramisu (which I never made)
Beat yolk/2T sugrum/c mascarpone; whip c crm; fold in.Mix c espresso/2T rum.Lyr2x~10ladyfinger/spoonedrumcrm mixes/cocoa.Chill
GOOD ENOUGHT TO TWEET COMPETITION
Could you write a recipe in 140 characters? If so, enter our competition and be in with a chance to win a cookery class and weekend away.
The Prizes
The composer of the best recipe will win a luxury overnight stay for two people, with a four-course dinner and a cookery class at chef Catherine Fulvio's Ballyknocken Cookery School (pictured above). Three runners-up will receive copies of the new Avoca cookbook.
How to Enter
Write a 140-character recipe. It can be anything: starter, main course or dessert. Compress ingredients and instructions into a comprehensible 140-character message and enter through Twitter @lifenculture or through our website: irishtimes.com/goodenoughtotweet. Closing date: December 3rd
Terms and Conditions For full terms and condtions, see irishtimes.com/goodenoughtotweet
