It is a good bet Alexander Graham Bell and Betty Crocker didn't see this coming:
Cooks in grocery stores, flipping open palm-sized phones that are rigged to retrieve recipes and create grocery lists from some mysterious ether called the Internet.
But Rachael Ray and Steve Jobs sure did.
The Food Network superstar will send you 40 recipes a month via text message, and the man behind Apple's iPhone has made it possible for you to search the Web and see glorious pictures of dishes you might cook.
I don't think anybody saw me coming. Me, a wannabe foodie in her middle years who refuses to admit when technology might have passed her by.
Determinedly, I test-drove an iPhone and a souped-up cell phone on loan from AT&T to see if either one made it easier to plan a meal while standing in the middle of the grocery store.
It did not go well. I practically had to call the Geek Squad to help with dinner. But more on that later.
The fact is, technology moves relentlessly forward and cooks must move forward, too, or be tattooed as the ones who thought microwave ovens had no place in the kitchen.
"I am not Miss Techno-Savvy," said Tanya Wenman Steel, editor in chief for Epicurious.com, which has one of the most comprehensive Web and mobile recipe services out there.
"So I figure I am a good litmus test. Is this something I can figure out? Is this something I would like to do?"
The answer is, apparently, yes. Epicurious.com received an average of 183,000 views a month last year from users on mobile devices. Epi to Go, its dedicated mobile service, had an 18 percent increase in unique cell-phone users in 2007.
Mobile access to tens of thousands of recipes, plus ingredient substitutes, weight and measurement conversions, wine pairings, cocktail recipes and nutritional analyses appears to be the next step in the sophistication of the American palate.
A service for everybody?
`The fact is, this is not daunting to younger people. They think, `Of course, I will have this service,'" Steel said.
Natanya Anderson, an Austin, Texas, working mother, is in the target audience.
"I've been using my mobile devices to manage my world for two or three years now," she said on her Bluetooth headset while driving home from work.
The busy marketing executive plans a week's worth of menus, records the ingredient lists on a spreadsheet and e-mails the result to her phone for grocery shopping.
