How I long for the day when you could just look up a recipe in a book or even on line and get just a recipe.
These days it seems I have to trudge through piles of fluff - the “chef’s” bio, what their pets are named, prominent mention of name brands, latest dietary woo-woo, really, anything BUT cooking along with three dozen photographs of whatever - to finally, finally, get to an actual recipe.
Modern recipe books - that is, actual published books - can be just as bad.
I thought maybe I was just mis-remembering the past. I consulted cook books I have that are decades old. Nope. No fluff. The only one with even a vestige of fluff is my old Jewish recipe book that explicitly gives religio-cultural background to the food. And even that is organized so if you want you can do directly to the recipe.
Yes, it’s a bit of a weak pitting but I’m really REALLY annoyed by it.
I know exactly what you mean. I often have looked up recipes on my iPad, have to scroll down for days to get to the actual recipe…then when I am at the recipe and I have the pad propped up on the counter, trying to follow it, hands covered with meat juices or whatever-- very often, for whatever reason, the page will spontaneously reload, and go back to the very beginning. Grrrrr…
But have I got a hack for you for online recipes, and for anyone else annoyed with this! I just found this online a couple weeks ago, and it works like a charm:
Add ‘cooked.wiki/’ to the beginning of any recipe page (minus quotemarks), and it will produce a nicely formatted version of just the recipe.
Yeah. I have a Fanny Farmer cookbook published in the '50s. A Better Homes and Gardens from… I donno the '60s. They are a great go to book for ‘how much flour and how much egg for bread’
Also a NYT cookbook from around the same period.
We actually use the chili recipi out of the Better Homes and Gardens. We both like it. It has beans in it so I guess we are heathens.
My wife will buy the 20 minute cooking light magazine sometimes. It’s comical. The task is listed out in THREE steps, so it must be fast right? Ha. Each step has about 8 other steps. Sheesss put it in an outline will ya, I’ve totally lost my place in your run on ‘step’.
I’m kind of liking the NYT cooking app. It’s a paid service, so it needs to be good. You get a fluffy description and pictures, etc. It also has a Cooking Mode that just lists the ingredients and steps side by side, also preventing your iPad from clicking off or reloading.
The whole putting a story before the recipe is supposed to somehow foil recipe scraping bots from stealing your recipe to put on a different website.
I like the NYT recipes. They’re usually top-notch and by known chefs. It has an added feature of being able to save recipes to your personal “recipe box”.
If I click on a recipe that doesn’t have a “skip to recipe” button, I look elsewhere.
I’ll agree with you there. I don’t often make the same thing the same way twice. The magazines, say Mediterranean cooking or someting gives you ideas though.
Sometimes a recipe book comes to grief and must be replaced.
Also, for some books certain editions have different features and/or information. Joy of Cooking, for example varies surprisingly much from one edition to the next. If you are interested in, say, cooking game some will be more useful than others.
Thank you!. I dont want to read about how grandma always made this and how it looked and tasted and whatever bullshit SEO is added so that “grandma’s pickled bananas” or whatever is at the top of search results.
Next: the challenge to get the result in metric, instead of having to use Google to tell me how much a pound weighs and how hot 356°F is.
Although, to be fair, my mum still uses imperial measurements. She, however just writes the recipe onto paper without the irritating fluff.
Another thing I like about the NYT recipes is they print correctly, with photo. You have to click on the little printer icon to get the option to include photo.
Luckily many websites have a Jump to Recipe link at the top. When they don’t I usually move on to the next one. Another problem I find often are a poorly constructed recipe, ingredients left off the list, or ingredients listed and never used in the directions. And frequently I find recipes that are copies from other sources that leave out some necessary info.
I read recipe books. I like them. They inspire me. For example I had a recipe book that had swordfish with pomegranate coulis, a combination I could now google, but never occured to me. It was spectacular.
I also like recipe books because they give me ideas for dishes that are not in the books, and I can freestyle my own inspiration from there.
A simple example. I got a recipe book, years ago, written by Jamie Oliver, with a recipe for hand-made pasta. It interested me. It inspired me. I mean this was for very simple pasta, cut with a knife into rough tagliatte.
Then I went on to crazy stuff like (again) hand-made deep fried tortellini, but without that recipe book it just would not occur to me . (On that occasion I even made an extra vegan version, with no egg, as two of our guests were unwilling to eat egg pasta - it just encouraged my creativily)
Recipe books are cool (to a certain group of nerds - I am proud to say I am one of them)
Speaking of the 1960s, I’m reminded of the Time-Life Foods of the World book series (I had The Cooking of Africa and The Cooking of Italy). Each book had chapters filled with just “fluff;” i.e., introductory stories, history, personalities, folkways, lots of full-page color pictures, and following each chapter, a collection of just recipes relating to the subject of the chapter. There were separate indexes for recipes vs. people/places/things mentioned in the chapters, and there was a recipe index for the native names of dishes and another index for the English translations.
Best of all were the separately printed recipe books published along with the main books, small format, spiral bound to lie flat open for practical use in the kitchen, indexed by ingredients as well as recipes, and “just the facts, ma’am.”
IANAL but I believe it’s a legal thing. With exceptions, you can’t copyright a recipe, as it’s just a list of procedures. However, if you included, say, a short article about whatever and a few paragraphs describing the process in an original, narrative manner, that is absolutely copyrightable.
And this brings to mind the other mega-annoying “feature” of a lot of the on line recipes: the giant red clickbait “PRINT” button in the middle that wants you to install some dodgy app that will haunt you forever