THE HOURGLASS

When The New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser and the chef and food writer Merrill Stubbs were working on The Essential New York Times Cookbook, busily testing more than 1,500 recipes together, they could not help but notice a clear shift happening across the food landscape. “We saw that people had gone from wanting to just consume information about food to wanting to share their knowledge about food and be recognized for it, and we felt there had to be some way to tap into what real home cooks were doing and create a place online that was more true to what was going on,” Stubbs says. “Basically, we wanted to create the place where we wanted to hang out.”

So was born Food52, their wildly popular—and populist—online community for home cooks. They launched the website in 2009 with a very specific goal in mind, Stubbs says: “Could we create the first crowd-sourced cookbook in 52 weeks?” The site was built to handle recipe submissions and weekly recipe contests from which the book’s content was drawn. But when the cookbook was finished, Food52 lived on, becoming a “collaborative, curated hub for home cooks,” Hesser says. This past summer, Hesser and Stubbs added an online kitchen and home shop to the site. Called Provisions, the store is the result of Hesser and Stubbs scouring the market for the finest kitchen goods: the perfect steel paella pan, say, or the perfect Moroccan clay tagine.

For Whisper Editions, Hesser and Stubbs have curated an exclusive collection of three kitchen knives by R. Murphy Knives, a company whose products they feature at Provisions and which has been crafting heirloom cutlery in Ayer, Massachusetts since 1850. The set comes with a paring knife, a fillet knife, and a chef's knife, each handle carved from reclaimed maple sourced from 100-year-old homes in Cleveland, Ohio. “For Whisper we wanted to work with artisans we have already worked with and love,” Stubbs says, “to create something that will be uniquely ours, uniquely useful, and uniquely beautiful.”

Shop Food52's edition for Whisper here.