Eat Tweet

Maureen Evans has produced a tiny recipe book called Eat Tweet written entirely in 'Twitterese'. We test and translate some of the recipes.

Freshly baked chocolate nut cookies, made using one of the recipes in Eat Tweet by Maureen Evans.Chocolate Nuts Cookies. (Jeffrey E Biteng / The National)

Eat Tweet is a cookery book with a difference. Several differences, actually. It is light-weight and pocket-sized, yet still manages to cram in more than 1,000 recipes. But how? Well, the clue lies in the title; all the recipes, from bechamel sauce to biscotti, are written in tweet form, ie in fewer than 140 characters.

Condensing recipes in this manner is no small feat. It required the author, Maureen Evans, to develop her own succinct cooking code and take full advantage of established Twitter language (Twitterese). Despite the tight format, Evans's recipes are ambitious; she provides instructions for making soufflés, marmalade and even boeuf bourguignon, adapted from the legendary (and lengthy) Julia Child version.

Evans began tweeting in 2007, back in the early days of Twitter. Several factors inspired her to start. Her partner was one of Twitter's original programmers and she was initially intrigued by the challenge of "expressing something interesting in such a small space". Evans says that at that time she felt that lots of people, herself included "had a desire to bring home-cooking back into our lives, but were simply too busy to talk about it". By tweeting recipes, she was able to share her passion for cooking quickly and with minimal fuss.

Over the next couple of years, these tiny recipes became increasingly popular and followers challenged her to tweet ever more ambitious instructions. An article in the New York Times in 2009 brought her@cookbook account to international attention and these messages soon captured the imagination of the tweeting community. She now has some 50,000 followers – Twitter jargon for fans – many of whom tweet recipes back to her daily.

Eat Tweet is the first cookbook of its kind and it is very different from the numerous others on the market. There aren’t any arty shots of the chef in question parading around a perfect kitchen, or windy, sentimental introductions here.

Instead, it is condensed yet stylish. Evans says that she worked hard to “create a shorthand that wasn’t faddish. I wanted people to be able to pick up the language easily, so that deciphering the recipes soon became second nature”. Despite the omitted vowels, scattering of symbols and various abbreviations, Evans’s tweets still have a certain fluidity to them. She says that this lyricism was important to her and that while composing the tweets, she was very conscious of how they sounded when read aloud.

Flicking through Eat Tweet for the first time proves to be rather overwhelming. The book is densely packed with recipes and they are written in a rather alien form – rife with slashes, dashes and words with missing letters. Take a few minutes to read the introduction and glossary, though, and things begin to make sense: a capital T denotes a tablespoon, in lowercase this means a teaspoon, ~ stands for approximately, a comma means then and a semi-colon next, while c indicates an American cup.

Getting to grips with this new-style language is actually quite fun - similar to cracking a code, albeit a culinary one. What would it be like to cook with, though? I began by attempting a relatively simple recipe for chocolate nut cookies:

Cream5T buttr&nutbuttr&sug; +egg/1/4t vanil&salt. Mix +c flr/1/2t bkgpdr;1/4 c chocchip. Wrap, chill log. Cut20. 8m@400F.

This turned out to be surprisingly easy. I assumed that by nutbuttr she meant the peanut kind and that because of the addition of baking powder, the flour that Evans referred to was plain. The only other ambiguity arose with the "wrap, chill log" instructions; I assumed that although the log is mentioned last, you are intended to make it first, then wrap it in cling film, before placing it in the fridge to chill.
Confidence boosted, I became more ambitious and turned my attention to a honey tagine, with the instructions:

Brwn 1b chopdlamb/2T buttr/t dryging&turmeric&cinn&s&p; +2c onion&carrot 9m; +c stock/3T honey/9pitdprune. Cvr~hCvr~h@400F.

Although the method was more complicated this time, it still wasn’t difficult to follow. Cooking from Eat Tweet simply requires you to use a bit more initiative than normal. For example, although the recipe doesn’t say so, it’s obvious that the vegetables should be peeled and chopped, before being placed in the pan. I was then unsure whether to add two cups of onion and carrot mixed together, or two cups of each vegetable. In the end, I opted for the latter, reasoning that if I was wrong, all it would mean was that the tagine was more vegetable-heavy than Evans had intended. The prunes and honey added a lovely caramelised sweetness and, all in all, the dish was a success.

Once you get to grips with the pared-down language, cooking from Eat Tweet is rather liberating. Because it doesn’t offer lengthy, dogmatic instructions, explaining when a sauce should be stirred or the exact size the meat should be diced into, a sense of independence prevails. When following a recipe, you tend to rely more on instinct than usual and improvise when needed; perhaps adding a handful of almonds and a few slices of preserved lemon to your tagine or some white chocolate chips to your cookies.

The absence of pictures grants further freedom. After all, there’s nothing worse than pulling a straggly, burnt around the edges chicken pie out of the oven, only to compare it with Delia’s perfectly golden version.

This is a book for people who view cooking as a pleasure, rather than a chore. It is not one for the nervy cook, who wants to be told how to slice an onion or when to shake a pan.

Nor would I advise that someone looks to Eat Tweet when they are attempting a dish for the first time and planning to serve it at a special occasion dinner for 12. On these occasions, a scout through a traditional cookbook or quick internet search is a better bet. Eat Tweet, meanwhile, is a book to have fun with. It stimulates the brain and should you buy it, it will add interest to both your kitchen repertoire and bookshelf.

Translated recipes:

Chocolate nut cookies:

Cream5T buttr&nutbuttr&sug; +egg/1/4t vanil&salt. Mix +c flr/1/2t bkgpdr;1/4 c chocchip. Wrap, chill log. Cut20. 8m cream together five tablespoons each of butter, peanut butter and sugar. Next add one egg, teaspoon of vanilla extract and teaspoon of fine salt. Mix, then add a cup of plain flour and teaspoon of baking powder. Next add cup of chocolate chips. Form the dough into a log, wrap in cling film and chill. Cut the dough into 20 pieces. Cook for 8 minutes at 400F.

Honey tagine:

Brwn 1b chopdlamb/2T buttr/t dryging&turmeric&cinn&s&p; +2c onion&carrot 9m; +c stock/3T honey/9pitdprune. Cvr~h brown 1 pound of chopped lamb in 2 tablespoons of butter, with one teaspoon each of powdered ginger, turmeric and cinnamon. Season with salt and pepper. Add two cups each of onion and carrot and cook for 9 minutes. Next add a cup of stock, 3 tablespoons of honey and 9 pitted prunes. Cover with a lid and cook for approximately one hour at 400°F.

Soda bread

Cut3/4c buttr/3c flr&whtflr/2t salt&soda/1/4c brsug. Fold +2c buttrmilk. Form rough dome on flrdbkgsheet. h fold together cup of diced butter, 3 cups each of plain and wholewheat flour, two teaspoons of both salt and baking soda and cup of brown sugar. Add 2 cups of buttermilk and bring together to form a dough. Shape into a rough dome and place on a floured baking sheet. Cook for an hour at 375°F, leave to stand for 12 hours before eating.

Eat Tweet is published by Artisan New York, a division of Workman Publishing Company, Inc