A cookbook takes birth on Twitter

NEW YORK, USA: Between writing poems and short stories and receiving rejection letters from publishers Maureen Evans began sharing her passion for cooking on Twitter almost three years ago.

Using the popular social network platform, which limits tweets to 140 characters, was easy because her partner Blaine Cook was its chief architect.

The 29-year-old Canadian's tweets of her condensed recipes have garnered more than 32,000 fans on @cookbook, her Twitter account.

Although her Twitter following is modest compared to those of celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Bobby Flay, it was still big enough for publisher Artisan to persuade her to compile her recipe tweets into a book. "Eat Tweet," will be launched on Thursday.

"The real benefit is that it's such a small book and it has 1,000 recipes in it, and it can fit in your back pocket," Evans said in an interview.

Her recipes are diverse and reflect her love for cooking, which was instilled by her parents while growing up in northern British Columbia and her time living in San Francisco.

Recent tweets ranged from a fruity couscous to a Thai yam khao pot, or corn salad.

Despite Twitter's tight format, Evans said she aims to pepper her recipes with a dash of lyricism.

"I do think food writing should appeal to the ear as well as the stomach. I try to leave some flavor of food writing there," said Evans, who now lives Belfast, Northern Ireland.

But she admitted that some recipes were difficult to translate into "twitterese," particularly Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon.

"First of all because the title is very long. It was a recipe that demanded I take full advantage of my use of punctuations," she said.

Her pared-down interpretation of Child's classic recipe features fewer ingredients and more than 20 times fewer characters.

Traditionalists may scoff at her recipes with their slashes and dashes and missing vowels, but Evans sees her tweets helping to quench the ever growing appetite for cooking knowledge.

"I don't intend to replace people's home cookbooks at all. It's a little bit of fun and a creative approach," Evans said.

Despite what she has achieved in the food world, she considers herself foremost a writer.

"I have a poet's heart and I bring that to everything I write, so I'm a writer who cooks," she said.

RECIPE (in Twitter format)

Augusta's Blueberry Tart (serves 3 to 4)

Cut1/2c buttr/c flr/2T sug/1/4t salt;

+ T vinegr. Press in pieplate, +3c berry/

1/2c sug/2T flr. 45m@400F. Top w 2c berry