I grew up using Fannie Farmer, The New York Times Cookbook and Joy of Cooking. Just recipes.
Even before Bourdain, though, some cooks became celebrities and 24-hour marketing machines. The more successful wanted to expound on their philosophies and acknowledge their greatest helpers and benefactors. A lot of cookbooks are named after the flagship restaurant and contain more pictures than recipes.
I don’t mind this up to a point. It’s hard to do better than Kenji or Flay. A website needs eyes and time, so relies on boring preambles, but these can be easily skipped. The familiar prologues in Cook’s Illustrated can be interesting but tend to be very similar. How many versions of the dish were disasters until the author remembered an ancient trick or tried a serendipitous ingredient or technique?
The recipes that are barely recipes can annoy, but they are possibly better than old “cookbooks” showing a hundred ways to use Bisquick.
I thought I’d heard somewhere that it was for search engine optimization; the fluff causes them to get ranked higher by Google, et. al. It’s probably a little bit of all of the above.
That was what I assumed “barely recipes” meant before I read the thread – “recipes” that basically amount to “combine a couple of canned goods and bake” like the ones you’d find in lots of midcentury cookbooks.
Luckily many websites have a Jump to Recipe link at the top.
Well, videos rarely do…
I remember saying “I’m going to look it up the recipe on YouTube.”
My kids immediately said “Okay, but you’ll have to skip ten minutes of news about the cook’s channel, and how he learned to cook with his grandma, til you get to the actual preparation.”
They weren’t kidding.
Afterwards, I told them:
Okay, I figured it out. This works for car repair or plumbing or cooking videos: If the host’s first words are “How’s everybody doing today?” skip ahead ten minutes. If the bouncy host is SO excited and gives the stats on how many followers or comments they’ve gotten, skip ahead twenty minutes…
And if it starts with music over a montage of past videos, skip completely.
I’ve always assumed SEO, ad exposure, and keeping you on the page for a longer period of time were the motivations behind the loathsome word bloat that accompanies many on-line recipes.
A few years ago I was part of a team writing material for a website. We used automated tools that scored everything we wrote for SEO and suggested ways to “improve” the text to get more hits and longer stays. We did not declare an article finished and ready for on-line publication until it reached a very high score.
It was nasty. I refused to allow my by-line on the finished products, as the process destroyed all originality and wit, replacing it with painfully simplified sentences, frequent repetition of key words, and mundane word choices - you’d get dinged for any vocabulary above a sixth grade reading level. Ugh.
I certainly haven’t made all of them, but the ones on repeat for me are the Dark Universal Stock, the meatballs for the Meatball Parm Hero (these are exactly the ones I remember having in Italian places where I grew up), and the Bodega Sandwich (though you really don’t need a recipe for those). We have that sandwich for dinner rather than breakfast. They’re sloppy, bad for you, and utterly delicious. I do not serve them with shitty coffee .
I make the Lobster Roll for myself sometimes, but since it’s just for me, I buy a single tail and use that, with the other ingredients sized down appropriately.
My hands-down favorite is the Spaghetti alla Bottarga. It’s another thing I make only for myself - it tastes like the sea. I usually use bucatini though - I like a fat toothsome pasta that stands up to the bottarga.
The Malloreddus with Wild Boar Sugo is very good, but a lot of work and wild boar is not a cheap ingredient. I had a similar dish in Florence with different pasta and it’s just terrific if you ever get a chance to make or try it.
I also have a recipe I got somewhere else for his Beef Bourguignon and will make that a couple times a year in the winter. It’s pretty classic.
I think on YouTube, videos need to be more than 10 minutes to get revenue from the ads YouTube is showing. It’s probably the same for recipes pages, need a certain amount of words to get higher Google traction in the responses and likely ad revenue too.
Yeah, I get that. But there are ways to do that without being obnoxious. Like having the entire recipe as one coherent part of the whole so the fluff/background/history/whatever is clearly separated from it, which would make it a whole easier to use the recipe.
I realize, of course, that the originator of the video/web page/whatever and I might have different objectives here. That doesn’t make their practices any less annoying to me.
And, for godsakes, when I get to the recipe I want the ingredients list and the method inline, not on two separate tabs (HTML tabs, not browser tabs) so I do not have to swap with my cooking greasy/dirty/doughy fingers. I use a mobile, mostly. I don’t want to keep touching the screen.
I guess I could pre-measure the ingredients, but I am a single male with not enough containers (and true to the jokes, not that interested in the directions)
I’d also like the recipe to be in metric as well as imperial, else I then need to spend time working out how much a pound is in kilograms, etc.
+1
I am in charge of a website - and the whole platform comes with a tool to evaluate the text. I normally score “red! - revise” …
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To get “green”, I need to use short sentences. Recipe and recipe-like keywords need to be repeated for recipe and other food stuff to rank high on recipe-search results.
It grates me. I understand - short sentences for stupid people. Half of the population are somewhat stupid. Hence I need to use short sentences. Oh - and avoid words with 3 or more sillables, again b/c of the Stupid.
Not only short sentences are required.
Frequent “paragraphs/line breaks” also …
facepalm
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Another pet-peeve of mine … the more “IG/Tik-tok” like the whole cooking process is in YT, to more often I hear:
… then add the onion-flakes
followed by the garlic-powder
a liberall sprinkle of potatoe flakes
jazz it up with some dried parsley
and add chicken nuggets before you serve it
(checks forum)
well FUCK that … I can see that you have zero idea of cooking and are using this sorry excuse of a video to push your prominently arranged tits cleevage and 3 inch long fingernails into my life to maximize hits…
as a rule, I get out of there before the 30 sec. threshold (which is similar to leaving neg. Feedback)
I endorse every word of the above post, with respect both to writing and cooking. Well, maybe with a little less ire at the physical appearance of the young women involved - they are responding (poorly, in my opinion) to societal pressure they did not create.
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