Yes, you can fit a recipe into a tweet.
Just ask Maureen Evans, author of Eat Tweet: A Twitter Cookbook. She has been sharing recipes with friends and families for years from the Twitter account @Cookbook, and realized early on that not only is it entirely possible, but it can also be fun.
"I try to pack in all of the necessary basics, so that a person can look at the instructions and the ingredients and start exercising their own expression of that recipe, because that's what real cooking is," she says.
There really is an art to this — a code, if you will. Evans uses slash marks to help group or separate steps and measurements.
"I've got a cranberry sauce recipe for Thanksgiving that says to simmer a cup of H20/a cinnamon stick/three whole cloves," she says.
Cranberry Sauce: Simmr c h2o/cinnstick/3whlclove/cardamompod/strip lem&orange zest/2c cranberry to burst; +½c sug(+to taste). Yld 2c.
— Maureen Evans (@cookbook) November 15, 2014
An "&" (the symbol for "and") gathers ingredients added at the same time and in the same amounts. Steps in the recipe are separated by semicolons, and vowels are almost entirely absent. You can find the entire code book here.
Here's her recipe for pumpkin pie:
Pumpkin Pie: Mix,heat10½oz candpumpkin/c brsug/2T SweetSpice/½t salt; +½c crm&milk. Beat+4btnegg. Fill PieShell. 25-30m@400F(center jiggly).
— Maureen Evans (@cookbook) November 16, 2014
Although you might have to cut out some of the instructions and detail, Evans promises that that might not be such a bad thing.
"I think it's what's not said that allows for that creativity," she says.
Share your recipes throughout the holidays with the hashtag #NPRcooks on Twitter.
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