My Favorite Recipe Source

I have stacks and stacks of cookbooks, including cookbooks I’ve “made” from binders using the magazine clippings that I’ve collected over the years.  I also have a family cookbook that includes recipes from my mom and dad, my grandmothers, and other recipes from family friends, holidays, and client occasions I’ve cooked meals for.  However, I consistently turn to the New York Times Cooking App for daily cooking and inspiration when I’m planning my menus for the week, looking ahead to a dinner party, or brainstorming for a holiday celebration.  

I imagine my love of the NYT cooking app comes from sheer convenience; most of us have our phones near us at all times, or at least most of the time, so it’s at the ready any time I have a moment of boredom or need to begin working on my menu for next week.  When you open the app, there’s a daily recipe features prominently at the top, which rotates every day so as to offer the user an immediate shot of visual inspiration.  Below the daily recipe headline, the app organizes a visual history of the recipes you’ve recently viewed, as if to remind you of what you were previously searching for or felt called to investigate in a deeper way.  And then below your history bar, there’s an additional offering of suggestions based your viewing history, as if to say “we noticed you like “xyz,” so you might also like these recipes in our archive.  I find it charming when I’ve searched out a bunch of soup recipes and then the app offers me something similar, like a stew-y chicken dish or a pot of beans that can be turned into a number of similar dishes.  

And yet convenience alone doesn’t fully honor why this app is my go-to recipe source.  The New York Times attracts some of the best food writers of our time, names like Melissa Clark, Yotam Ottolenghi, and David Tanis.  However, the Times has a history of hiring some of the best names in the food game, including icons like Craig Claibourne and Julia Child. When I subscribe to this app (yes, it’s a small fee), I not only gain access to all the recipes they are posting right now, I also have access to any recipe they’ve ever published in the history of the New York Times.  That’s quite an archive of recipes in the palm of your hand, ready to inspire tonight’s dinner, this weekend’s food project, or be featured on your holiday dinner table, which brings me to another benefit: diversity of recipes.