A home on the Web for home cooks

Home cooks are to restaurant cooks what salt is to saffron. The latter may wow you with an exotic flavor, but the former is what makes everything taste good, every day.

“I’ve always been a home cook in my heart,” said Merrill Stubbs, a member of Chapin’s Class of 1995. She is celebrating home cooking everywhere — and acknowledging it as the art that it is — through a project called food52.

Centered on a website, food52’s mission is simple: to create a cookbook from the best recipes sent in by home cooks over the course of one year and, by doing so, to develop a community where home cooks can share innovative ideas and recipes.

“Home cooks are way more savvy than they’re given credit for,” Merrill said. “And there’s no real place for them to be recognized.”

Merrill and her partner in food52, former New York Times Magazine dining editor Amanda Hesser, post two recipe contests on the website each week. One week might offer a call for a stew made with olives and a fig dish; the next prompt could be for mustard chicken and an autumn vegetable purée. Cooks submit relevant recipes to the site, and Merrill and Ms. Hesser test the most promising candidates before deciding on two finalists. They present the finalists’ recipes to the site’s users, who cast votes for which is best. The winning recipes will be published in the food52 cookbook, slated for early 2011.

“We’ve been blown away by their quality,” Merrill said.

She knows a good recipe when she sees one. Merrill has cooked for roommates and friends for a long time, but she has professional chops, too. After teaching lower school at Buckley for one year after college, Merrill decided that culinary school was more to her taste. She packed her bags for London, where she attended Le Cordon Bleu. Though being a restaurant chef wasn’t her calling, she used her training toward other food-related pursuits. She moved to Boston where she was a private chef and caterer for three years; during that time she also interned at Cook’s Illustrated magazine and worked for almost a year at Flour bakery.

“I thought about food writing very early on,” Merrill said.

Merrill moved back to New York and began writing about food in earnest, which brought her into contact with Ms. Hesser, who was compiling a cookbook for the Times. Ms. Hesser enlisted Merrill to help her on the book, and soon enough, they were chatting about how many of the recipes published in the Times originally came from home cooks.

“Home cooks have two wonderful qualities,” Merrill said. “They’re inventive, and they’re practical.”

Those are the exact qualities that food52 celebrates, and its website reflects that — the content goes beyond great recipes for brussels sprouts. Users can watch slide shows and videos of Merrill and Ms. Hesser as they cook and test recipes. They can browse profiles of other cooks who submit recipes or comment on a blog where Merrill and Ms. Hesser write about cooking. It’s a true “Web 2.0” site, driven as much by multimedia features as it is by the people who use it.

“We’re still seeing what the future holds for the site,” Merrill said, given that “the job of every website owner is to listen to your users.” The users of food52 want her to keep cooking.