I'm here to bear witness to the fact that it is possible to win something in a sms-quiz. This friday I picked up a mysterious package at the post office - it turned out to be a pocketsize cookbook, written by this man. I had won the daily MetroExpress sms-quiz which I had tried to submit to while slightly bored riding the metro to work earlier in the week.

Anyway, I picked up the book and looked at it and discovered that here was a book, highly influenced by web-aesthetics (a nice example of remediation also taking affect the other way round):

1) The book has a clear "webaesthetic" quality about the typography: important words are marked in another font-colour, so you have sentences in black where a word in blue suddenly springs out at you. The blue font gives them a highly "clickable" feel (being used to as I am that differently coloured words are also a standard way of marking linked words - like on this page); the way they looked really makes me want to click on them with my fingers to see what happens. In addition, the font itself is a webpage-font style thing: no feet and suited for quick reading-browsing (narrow arial?)

2) I have never seen a cookbook so consequently uncategorical. I have tried to figure out the ordering principle behind the order of recipes but there just isn't one. They are not ordered alphabetically, nor in order of raw material (fish, poultry etc), nor by types of recipe (appetizer, dessert) or days of the week etc. Haute-couture desserts are next to fish dishes which are next to bread recipes which are next to salads - the entire thing comes across as a mass of dishes as random as what a Google search on "recipe"would present to you. It is simply a random-access recipe database.

3) The book has small extra info "links" at the bottom of the page: one is a comment on what to do with the dish later, another explains how the particular dish goes with your blood type. They are not really conventional footnotes, but exactly something you would click on to get additional info in an online version.

I should not forget to add, that seeing the book is so (unintentionally?) weblike, it is a disappointment to go to the website of the book. Nice, but no recent updates and in terms of information architecture a bit messy (the usual confusion between local and global navigation). But if you hang around long enough for the page to be updated, you should be able to buy the book with the author's signature included. It goes by the simple title mad (food)...

P.S. Tested out a recipe and tried tasting multe (grey mullet) for the first time in my life. Not bad for a fish, especially fried with curry paste, the Boserup style.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 20:12