Cooking as an art, and baking as a science - I like that. That makes perfect sense to me. It took me quite a while to get comfortable with screwing around with my baking recipes - as an experienced baker, I do it successfully all the time now, but not at first. I screw around with cooking all the time, though - my signature dish is my goulashes - made out of whatever’s in the fridge, and very tasty (almost) every time. There’s definitely a different feeling to making a unique goulash to making a batch of oatmeal cookies with extra wheat bran added in.
My husband (a mostly non-cook) has invented a recipe for mushroom soup that is surprisingly good - he mixed a can of mushroom soup with a can of tomato soup, added one can of milk and one can of water, some parmesan cheese and some cottage cheese, and steak spice and oregano for seasoning. I don’t know why this works, but it does.
FYI: “Proper ingredients” for Carbonara never, ever, ever include heavy cream. That’s not sayin’ you can’t make a good pasta sauce with cream and bacon and eggs. But if it’s got cream in it, it ain’t Carbonara.
I think it would be ok with most people if someone went to a recipe site, modified the recipe (either due to lack of ingredients or because of personal taste), and then commented on it. I see the comments section as being very valuable in finding out how the recipe works, even with variations.
I don’t see this thread as objecting to the comments, so much as the ratings. If I alter someone’s recipe then I might still comment on it, but I wouldn’t give a rating (e.g. 3 stars out of 5, or whatever). The ratings are often the first thing that show up when you search for recipes, and it’s possible to search recipes by rating. It’s not fair to lower or raise a recipe’s rating by changing the recipe and then rating it based on your changes - it doesn’t give a true picture of the recipe itself.
Also, I’ve seen people “mark down” a recipe because their changes sucked (“I didn’t have x, so I used y. And I don’t like z, so I used a and b. Didn’t like, rated 1/5.”).
But I’ve also never seen someone “mark up” a recipe because their changes were better (This recipe wasn’t correct, so I used premium x instead of regular x, and it really should use p instead of q, as that’s how it’s traditionally made. My version was great. 5/5.")"
All, pretty much anecdotal there, but a valid observation. I think that an easily modified recipe that gets high rank speaks to the original recipe and its quality and versatility. Aussie style Stroganoff is a bastard child as it is, why not make some heirs to the throne? I just posted a link to a recipe not a week back, that was an up and up improvement on Potato Dill Rolls by the simple addition of a sourdough starter instead of the original recipe and packaged yeast… If it was up to any of you and your anal requirements, that lowtech addition (starting Herman with some grapes and flour in the corner.) would have never seen the light of day.
I don’t see anyone saying that recipes are dogmas and ought not to be touched. What we’re saying is that if you have modified a recipe as posted, then it isn’t the same recipe, and is then unfair to rate it based on your version.
And why do you assume they are rating based on their version? If the base doesn’t stand up, it doesn’t stand up. Why is your reality better than their objective reality?
Are you that obtuse? It’s been said again and again in this thread that people make the recipe once, switch one or more ingredients in the recipe for ones that don’t work, hate it, and rate the original recipe poorly. They never make the original to begin with, so how can they know how it stands up?
This doesn’t make any sense. When you go to the recipe and rate it, the “it” you are rating is the recipe given. That’s just common sense and the English language, right?
If someone said, “I changed X, Y, and Z, and the recipe with those changes sucked,” then people would of course know that the recipe that person is talking about isn’t the recipe under discussion. But then they have no business adding a review to the recipe under discussion, because that isn’t the recipe they made. So it isn’t that their reality (the changed recipe) is “better” than our reality (the original recipe), it’s that their reality (their recipe) isn’t relevant to our reality (the original recipe).
I can only speak to the OP and the comments he/she gave as examples. It doesn’t appear as if they rated the recipe on any scale. They simply made comments based on their utilization of the recipe. They didn’t pan it like a critic.