Browse Exhibits (3 total)

Write or Get Lost

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     When your life gets chaotic the easiest thing you can do is sit down and write it out. Having everything up in the air stressing you out is the quickest way to get lost in it all. A more effective way would be to clearly state what you have going on and jot down ways to fix it. This will help towards the solution or end goal you are aiming for. Writing out your day, to-do lists, and even writing to someone are all ways we can better our lives through one simple task. 

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Storytelling, Trouble-Shooting & Reviews: The Social World of Cook’s Illustrated.com’s User Comments

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Food blogs have been a game-changer for home cooks. The genre allows people to write in the comments, ask the blogger questions, and talk to their fellow users. The Museum of Everyday Writing features several exhibits dedicated to recipes, from those handwritten on notecards to notes in the margins of the ingredients list. Yet, food blogs are a different genre of everyday writing. If a cook flips through the pages of their printed Better Homes and Gardens book for a chocolate chip cookie recipe, they cannot interact with the recipe’s creator, quibble over precise measurements, nor ask about most effective equipment for their task. Frequent visitors to food blogs do all these things— and much more because of their medium.

This exhibit is intended to feature the kinds of everyday writing that appear on the food blog comments of Cook’s Illustrated. While, there are countless food blogs on the Internet, Cook’s Illustrated.com has one of the most extensive libraries of user comments where users interact with the recipe content and hold discussions with their fellow users. Once people pay a monthly membership fee, they are granted access to these blog recipes, TV episodes, equipment reviews, and have the ability to comment using a combination of text and images. True: some comments might range from simple one-word sentiments such as “Delicious!”or “Sub-par.” On the other hand, there are other occasions when food blogs, Cook’s Illustrated included, hosts threads between fellow users share stories related to the recipes, trouble-shoot confusions about instructions, or rate the recommended equipment.

Cook’s Illustrated might be one of the most well-known cookbook companies in the publishing industry. Their recipe instructions must be scrupulously approved by America’s Test Kitchen chefs before being published in the magazine, books, television show, or posted on the website’s blog containing the archive of 5,255+ recipes. However, this exhibit of interactions in the discussion boards hopes to demonstrate that recipes by companies aren’t perfect and cooking is inherently social. 

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Casserole Recipes

As the weather turns cooler and the holiday season approaches, there's one dish that I start to crave: casserole. While my mother’s squash casserole is my favorite (a staple at our Thanksgiving table), I rarely encounter a casserole that I will not try. There’s something about the homemade, hot dish that strikes me as the epitome of comfort cooking. As I thought about the casserole recipes I might make this year, I began to wonder about the history of the casserole. When and where did the dish originate? How did it come to be an American culinary staple?  In looking at recipes, we might begin to better understand the iconic place of the humble casserole. To that end, this exhibit showcases a variety of casserole recipes composed and shared by everyday people.

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