Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs are looking for a few good recipes. More than a few, actually: 156, to be exact.

Even though they're each experts in the kitchen—Hesser has been a food columnist for the New York Times for over a decade; Stubbs has worked for Cook's Illustrated, the Times, and many others—they need your help. You see, they have a cookbook due out from HarperStudio next year, and they've built a website called food52 to gather and curate recipes for the book. Whatever Web 2.0 buzzwords you choose to describe it—Crowd-sourced cuisine? Aggregated appetizers? Choose-Your-Own-Cooking-Adventure?—the creators are aiming to use the tools of the Web to change the way cookbooks are created.

"We wanted to present this very simple idea," Hesser said recently at a homey cafe in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, which serves as her and Stubbs' unofficial office. "Let's build this cookbook together."

At the same time, they aim to make a new kind of food site, one she describes as "more than a vast database of recipes." "A food site that felt curated, that felt like there are people behind it," she explained.

"When we started thinking about this, I think probably a lot of people would've thought we were crazy to start a business with the economic climate the way it was," Stubbs said. "But actually we thought it was a great time to start a business online."

In that impulse they're not alone. Other journalists have chosen to start their own Web businesses in the teeth of the recession, going without the safety nets of the large (though suddenly shaken) media companies that have tended to support them. Take Sharon Waxman, the former Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times who launched her own entertainment-business news site earlier this year. Just last week, her site, The Wrap, inked a content-sharing partnership deal with Microsoft.

A food- and cooking-oriented site may also prove to be a good idea for a very bad moment in time. According to a recent Washington Post report, U.S. consumers bought 7.5 million cooking and entertaining books in the first nine months of 2009. Despite this year's economic downturn, an editorial in the most recent issue of Gourmet Retailer, a trade publication, foresees the quality food market "poised for a renaissance" since "if one is to forgo a European vacation or a new car, then artisan cheeses, extra-virgin olive oil, and high-end cookware don’t seem so extravagant." (Taking that triumphalism just one step too far, the editorial also proclaims, "Copper and stainless steel are the new black…")

"There are many excellent food sites online—and an increasing number of them," Stubbs adds. "But interestingly, there isn't really a space that studies the talent and knowledge of home chefs."

Food52—Hesser says the name came partly out desperation searching for a domain name not yet taken and because she and Stubbs like names like Area 51 and Matchbox 20—has been in development for nine months. After a dozen weeks of closed membership, it's now in beta with just over 3,000 registered members who can submit recipes, discuss others' work, and vote on the weekly finalists chosen by the site's founders to narrow down the 156 recipes needed for the book. Two recipes will be chosen by users each week along with one wild card picked by Hesser and Stubbs.