Thank-you everyone for your feedback and comments. This week I've been exploring recipe formats for the video sharing platform TikTok. As well as thinking more about the ways that food and recipes form connections between people.
Working through the feedback I'm questioning the medium of augmented reality. It may be that a mobile based app will give greater focus on the ways that sharing recipes forges stronger connections between people. As a bonus this would give me a chance to build skills with unity before jumping into a whole new technology platform.
When I think about the human meanings we give to recipes, particularly the recipes we share, it is affirming the commonalities with the recipient ... we both love to enjoy homebaked apple teacake on a cold afternoon, we believe we both have the ingredients and equipment in our kitchens ... as well as building stronger personal bonds as we reveal these personal aspects of our identity ... my grandmother taught me to bake, I want to share this skill with you, and I hope you will enjoy this recipe.
The apple tea cake recipe has been posted on the sharing platform TikTok as a 1 minute video. I've framed the recipe as something I'm sending to my young niece who lives in another city and has just moved into a new home. The format is very cluttered as I took a maximalist approach to before I start to identify the minimum needed to effectively convey the procedural informaiton in a recipe. On reflection, it's interesting how a visual format can provide a rich context for measures, the 30g of butter isn't measured with a scale, it can be measured visually, and for techniques such as separating the yolk from an egg white. There is a lot of scope to explore a full time context, this video is compressed into 1 minute (the maximum dictated by the platform) but the next video will play with the 10 minutes it takes to prepare the food.
There is a challenge with this video format for demonstrating the recipe. My kitchen is messy, dark and nothing like the aspirational kitchens of professional cooking shows. Some food writers are moving away from this aspirational, luxury style of imagery but no-one seems to be embracing the flour covered, sugar spilt, fingerprint strewn cooktops of my home. This is something I'll need to tackle as I iterate through versions of recipe formats.