All those curation arguments boil down to trademarks and branding. If you don't know enough to judge for yourself, you still have to know enough to judge whether the judge you delegate knows enough to judge for you.
Maybe you delegate to Alton Brown because he is on television and you like how he explains things. You're choosing to trust Alton Brown to only put his trademark on things that Alton Brown approves of. But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know! Based strictly on screen time, he seems better at describing what he is eating than actually cooking anything.
If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do. How do you know you can trust those reviewers? A lot of them are just food snobs parroting what they learned from previous generations of food snobs.
The key precept is that when you are the one doing the choosing, it's less likely that someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick.
The argument against curation is that the pool of potential curators is just as deep and variable in quality as the things they curate. So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers. And then you need a meta-meta-curator to judge the quality of your meta-curators, and it's just tortoises all the way down. I'd prefer to do an objective analysis. Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best. The same process can inform you as to what brand of tomatoes is best in your homemade pasta sauce, or whether unbroken-grain wild rice is really worth the price premium over the bits and pieces, or which tortillas are best for burrito night, or which beer brand is best for general drinking.
Trust the objective measurements. A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks.
And that makes you a reliable curator for your friends and family, because your meta-curator is the unimpeachable wisdom of objective science!
Because I've found the information from his shows has been useful in improving the output of my own cooking. Otherwise, I wouldn't have bought any of his cookbooks.
> If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do.
Cookbooks are generally not written for, or primarily marketed to, people who don't know anything about cooking.
> So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers.
That's what acquaintances you know who have demonstrated proficiency in the kitchen are for.
> Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best.
This is optimal, but an extreme time and resource hog if you are going to do it with a wide enough range of recipes to be meaningful with no prior filter, and also logistically problematic because many dishes are sensitive to holding time (and because of variability in even skilled execution, you need to execute each recipe multiple times, grade them all, and do statistical aggregation of the results), so you need lots of parallel cooks and parallel kitchens to effectively execute this.
> Trust the objective measurements.
Ranking according to your preference is subjective measurement.
> A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks.
If you ignore time and resource constraints, it avoids the need for curation (whether earned or not), in practice, to be usefully used, you need a curated filter in front of the process (but then, it also feeds back into the process of meta-curation by providing information on the reliability of curators.)
With dishes that are sensitive to holding time, it's impractical to do more than two at a time. So you usually end up with a series of "beat the champion" trials between two options. It takes some extra effort, but compared to the amount of effort already expended in cooking, the marginal cost isn't that severe. If you're good at it, you basically end up with a few extra dishes to wash. Maybe you need some extra freezer or pantry space.
You have an entire lifespan to refine your recipes. But you also only have one lifespan to enjoy them, so it's good to do it efficiently.
The cooking recipe problem is the same as a lot of other things. Doing things scientifically is the best way to make things better, but you can't really trust that anyone else is not cutting corners, so any time someone shares their results, you have to be skeptical. The peer review system in place for cookbooks isn't any more trustworthy in my eyes than the one for academic chemists, and that is compounded by the fact that different people like different things.
No, I'm not.
Subjective (adj.): based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions
> A blinded taste test is an objective, qualitative measurement
No, the kind of blinded, ranked preference test you described is a subjective, quantitative measurement (the measure is ordinal rather than interval or ratio, but an ordinal measure is still quantitative if less powerful than other classes of quantitative measures.)
When the same taster is judging two dishes at the same time, the emotional state is the same, the taste buds are the same, the mental state is the same. The effect is the same as if you had a tasting robot programmed to output a number when you drop food into its sampling port. Most of the subjectivity is removed. But different people/tastebots have different calibration settings, so you can't compare results between tasters, or even between different times for the same taster. It's only objective if you taste steps to remove the subjectivity: blindfolds on, equal-sized portions, neutral-flavor palate-cleanser between tastes, quiet room, etc.; but if you are careful, you can then have reasonable confidence that if A > B in that subjective state, it is likely that A > B in most other subjective states, too. (Any state that caused B > A would then be considered "interesting".)
A subjective, qualitative measurement would be something like Scoville heat units. Each taster has a different sensitivity to piquant chemicals, and different rates of sensory adaptation, so multiple judges are used, and results are imprecise.
An ordinal ranking is not quantitative. You can't tell the following apart:
qualitative ordinal ranking
A > B > C > D > E > F > G > H
|<-theoretic quantitative measurement->|
----A---B--C-------D-EF---G------H------
------AB----C----D----E----F-----G--H---
A------------------------------BCD--EFGH
-------------A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H------------A pinch of informed trust would save you a pound of time and expense.
> But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know!
And if all I knew about Alton Brown or Guy Fieri was that they were hired by Food Network, you'd be right! Luckily, the Food Network also put out hundreds of hours of video content with those two guys, so I can get a better sense of where they're coming from, and so how trustworthy their food recommendations might be.
> someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick.
I'm okay with choices that benefit someone else, as long as it benefits me as well. Also known as: all of commerce. Hell, given two choices that benefit me, most of the time I'd prefer the one that benefits someone else as well—which is why I buy things I like, instead of pirating everything.
These two sentences contradict each other. You are correct: countless recipes are open source and freely available. However, that leads to the same problem with anything else that's freely available online—quality wildly varies. Without some strict curation of what's available, the expected value of a random recipe you find online is often too low to be worth spending the time and ingredients making.
Thus recipe books keep their value—if the book is well reviewed, you can have enough confidence in the recipes it contains to be worth the money and effort to make.