When we launched Food52, we weren’t trying to create a community. All we knew was that we wanted to build a business—and that we’d start by crowd-sourcing a cookbook. So we got a book deal, built a website, and after a year of recipe contests and photo shoots and coffee guzzling, we did just that: The Food52 Cookbook was published by William Morrow in October 2011.
But what we found during that year was that, with this shared mission, a lively community of devoted home cooks swiftly and organically arose. People were hanging out, sharing ideas, contributing to the book, and shaping the content and tone of the site. They helped each other with cooking questions, gently let newcomers in on the culture of the site, and chatted directly with us. A lot. And it was they who helped us figure out what the business would become.
Without us leading them to it, Food52’s members formed what we now call a constructive community: one that builds, makes, grows, cooks, and does things together. Potlucks were a natural—more than forty were thrown to celebrate the first cookbook’s release, from San Francisco to Nigeria. When a young cook named enbe proposed a holiday gift swap, we didn’t expect her to convince more than one hundred people to send their homemade ketchup and rum balls jetting cross-country, but she did, and they did, happily. We introduced the Food52 Hotline as a platform for cooks to help each other out, but it was the community that leapt to action every time a fellow cook needed a last-minute substitute for buttermilk or a fix for a sunken cake.
What you’ll see in these pages is the result of fifty-two contests from one year in the life of www.food52.com—from Your Best Recipe with Citrus and Olives to Your Best Dirt-Cheap Dinner—plus twenty-three Wildcard winners that we plucked from the community’s archives just because we loved them so much.
You’ll see the collective creative efforts of a new breed of community, 100,000 members strong (and counting!)—their recipes, comments, confessions, and advice. We hope you’ll find them as inspiring as we do.
Amanda & Merrill