Prompted by the passing of legendary British TV cooking show host Keith Floyd (see Sept. 15th post), Patrick West of spiked muses about the evolution of television cooking shows in Britain and Ireland and how they reflect attitude shifts towards food, often based on economic realities. In one of his final paragraphs, what West writes resonates with what I write at the end of WWWE: “The substance of our cookery programmes will change. I predict a little less frivolity, but a complete return to the austerity of the pre-Floyd era will be tempered by our underlying culture, not society’s overlying economics. For our culture does remain celebrity-orientated.”

Take a gander at Floyd engaged in the out-of-studio cooking instruction for which he was so well-known:

The staff of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and its companion TV show “America’s Test Kitchen” tests their recipes sometimes as often as 50 times before airing/publishing them. So it’s no surprise that the magazine’s editor (and show’s interlocutor), Christopher Kimball, is not thrilled about the idea of a recipe wiki. But some of you might be. Read all about “the joy of wikis” – including the likes of Foodista.com – in today’s New York Times‘ “E-Kitchens Can Get Crowded.”

Chris Kimball: Not down with crowd-sourced recipes

Again, in the spirit of cleansing confession and full disclosure, though I knew of the concept, I did not know the word was “twecipe.” I first saw it in the first paragraph of this here GOOD blog post by Peter Smith which deals with a subject near and dear (and quotes yours truly).