Turkey, Watson. Turkey Meatballs Now

November 26, 2015

I read an article which is not a sketch for Saturday Night Live.

The juxtaposition of Watson and turkey strikes me as something a comedy writing team would craft on a pressure packed Wednesday afternoon for a demanding Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert type entertainer.

I now believe “This Is IBM Watson’s Favorite Turkey Recipe” is an honest, down home, authentic effort from IBM’s tireless Watson researchers. It is difficult to get open source code, home brew scripts, and acquired technology to put Julia Childs’ recipe for turkey back in the drawer.

I asked, “Wow, Watson does turkey recipes?” Who knew?

The write up explains:

In honor of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, Fortune reached out to IBM to find out Watson’s perfect turkey recipe. What came back wasn’t exactly a Thanksgiving classic: meatballs.

Well, the savvy editors at Fortune were not happy with plain old meatballs. Watson ran another string of zeros and ones through its magical system and generated a hard cider sauce for those IBM meatballs. Inspiration may have come from Bob Dylan, the Watson icon, and the Dylan song Copper Kettle:

Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil
Fill it with new made corn mash and never more you’ll toil
You’ll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright
Watch them just a-filling in the pale moonlight.

The alcoholic touch adds zest to the bacon infused mix on an American holiday. I am not sure how this bacon and booze thing works for some religious groups, people with dependency problems, and health nuts who associate bacon with cancer and liquor with liver issues. Well, trivial issues I assume from the point of view of the Watson kitchen wizards.

Thanks to Fortune and IBM Watson for a delightful alternative to deep fried turkey on “a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year.” (Wikipedia)

Stream a Dylan tune and dig in, gentle reader. (Aren’t meatballs Swedish?) Ask Watson.

Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2015

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Marketing, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.