A visual feast

Cookz combines cartoons and cooking

By Ashley Griffin Gartland

May 17, 2007

The magazine Cook's Illustrated has won legions of fans for its meticulous descriptions of the cooking process and its line drawings and photographs showing how it’s all accomplished.

Now there’s a funky online alternative to the Cook’s visual model in the form of Cookz, a New Zealand website featuring step-by-step recipes and cartoonishly simple illustrations. The chocolate-chip cookie recipe, for example, looks like Hello Kitty recently took up baking.

The Cookz site is currently just a teaser, but the full meal deal is set to launch later in May. Cookz began as a student project at the University of Technology in Sydney and was inspired by designs of the airplane-emergency-card variety.

According to a recent blurb in the New York Times Magazine, designer Lauren Bugeja hopes the site and diagram-based recipes will appeal to visual learners and also cross cultural boundaries in the culinary world.

Can’t wait long enough for Cookz? Pick up the James Peterson classic Essentials of Cooking and his latest, What’s a Cook to Do?. With photographed steps teaching readers such skills as how to make a crustacean broth, Peterson’s efforts demonstrate that a picture truly can be worth a thousand recipe directions.