Recipes on line

Cafe Society
1

Do you read the stories that seem to come before all recipes you find on line? How Great-great-grandma smuggled the secret family herb mixture across the ocean and deserts as she fled oppression? Or how Uncle Ralph was messing around in the kitchen despite Aunt Mable banning him, and he came up with the most amazing casserole? Or, well, you know.

OK, I made up those examples. I look for the Jump to Recipe button, and if there isn’t one, I move on. When I’m trying to find a different approach to chicken, I really don’t give a flying fig that Queen Victoria herself pressed a copy of this very recipe into the hand of her beloved housemaid as she breathed her last…

So, yes or no - do you wade thru the narratives? And if you do, why? Not being snarky, I’m truly interested in your reasons.

2

Never. The story is only there because the recipe itself can’t be copyrighted.

3

No, not usually. If I’m researching a recipe in advance on my PC, I might take the time to read the whole story, or at least some of it, but if I’m looking for a quick recipe on my iPad I don’t want to take forever scrolling down though a million pics and 10,000 words of content to finally find the recipe. Plus, my iPad is old and it tends to temporarily freeze up at spots while scrolling through content-heavy pages.

Here’s a life-changing hack: type ‘cooked.wiki/’ (without the single quotes) in front of the URL of any recipe page online, and it will distill it down to only the recipe. Works like magic.

Example without cooked.wiki/

Example with cooked.wiki/

4

I always thought the lengthy narration was to keep the reader scrolling and on the page.

5

There is a real audience for those stories or they would have disappeared. It’s never about you, but capturing bunches of your real audience.* Once you’ve captured enough you draw a bigger following and rank higher on Google and get people who are only there for the recipes. No problem. Put in a Jump to Recipe link, which almost everyone now has. You’ve now captured slices of two real audiences. Everybody wins, including the endless number who need to complain about the stories online but still visit the sites.

* This applies to everything in life.

6

Same here. The only time I’ve read the preamble has been with some recipes by Kenji Lopez-Alt. He goes into exhaustive detail about the whys of his ingredients and the reasons why you should follow certain procedures, and the science makes for interesting reading at times. But once you’ve read some of the whys, it no longer seems necessary to read them again. I get it: fish sauce adds umami.

7

Nope, 99% of the time. Sometimes there’s useful discussion about process, cultural origins, or food science. In those cases, if the writing is good, concise, isn’t interrupted by too many in-line ads, and is relevant to my cooking process, I’ll read. Rambling about personal backstory (likely made up) or effusive self-praise about how juicy/irresistible/etc the recipe is is likely to make me not trust the recipe.

Good writing is good writing. If you can’t do it in your copy, I am skeptical you can write a good recipe. And I understand that SEO is the name of the game for websites trying to make a living at this, but my tolerance for word salad (no recipe required :stuck_out_tongue: ) is limited. I resent the fact that we must tolerate bad writing with a smile because it’s what marketing requires.

Taking the website @solost linked, the text contains useless gems like:

Well, we think this is The Best Homemade Salsa Recipe around because it is healthy, quick to make, offers a fine chunky texture, and is brimming with absurd amounts of flavor.

Oh, brimming with absurd amounts of flavor, you say? I prefer overflowing with ridiculous morsels of deliciousness myself.

The canned tomatoes provide a rustic essence and sweetness

Ah yes, the “rustic essence” of canned tomatoes. Which, by the way, are the “secret ingredient” of this recipe.

I also roll my eyes that the recipe title is “Best Homemade Salsa” and appears as such in the copy of the recipe.

tl;dr - because I’m a grumpy old man, if you can’t get to the point writing in a way that reflects actual human-to-human communication, I am uninterested in your recipe.

8

Years ago when I was a professional writer (those days are long gone; thanks AI!), I was approached about writing for a recipe site. Basically they wanted me to write fluff because something something SEO before the readers actually got to the recipes. The money would have been good, but I figured, if I hate reading that nonsense so much, I was probably going to hate writing it worse. I passed.

9

I have a browser extension installed which does this with 2 clicks.

10

What I don’t like is a ridiculous amount of exposition about the ingredients or whatever. “You’ll notice we use flour in this cupcake recipe. Flour is necessary for the structure and substance of the cupcake. If you use bread flour, the cupcake will be dense; if you use cornstarch, the cupcake will fall apart. That’s why we prefer to use regular all-purpose flour for the perfect cupcake structure and texture. This recipe also calls for salt. Salt adds flavor and …blah blah blah.”

11

We can probably blame chefs like Alton Brown and Lopez-Alt for that trend among lesser cooks. They think belaboring the bloody obvious makes it somehow more interesting and also makes them seem like they actually know WTF they’re doing.

12

Worse are the pop up windows. Do you want to subscribe to our newsletter?.. Click here to save for later… Add the ingredients to your shopping cart I’ll ditch that recipe at the first shenanigan like that.

13

Isn’t that sort of thing necessary to explain why substitutions wouldn’t work?

14

This is the answer. The longer you’re on the page, and the more scrolling across the many, many ads, the more you monetize the page. And you might just end up clicking on one of those ads. Or on a link to the pan being used, or the hard-to-find ancient grain non-gluten cake flour.

15

It’s never occurred to me that anyone reads all that bullshit.

“Jump to Recipe” or see ya for me.

mmm

16

Another vote for “never”. In fact I usually do a Ctrl-F search for the word ‘print’. More often than not, that will find the phrase ‘print this recipe’ which is right next to the text-only version of it. That way you can skip right past the intro story and the long, multi-page version of the recipe where every step has an explanation of what each ingredient does, what substitutions you can make, an affiliate link to the measuring cups and blender you’re using and all the pictures, because I needed pictures of a bowl with two stick of unmelted butter in it, then another picture of the same bowl, but with melted butter.

17

But that is entirely different that some looong screed about how you learned to cook from you mom, who learned fro her mom back into the depths of time, and to make a pot roastedwho-beastone starts by slicing one end ‘thusly’ insert picture … culminating in some twaddle tale about she cut the end off because her mo did and her mom did and it ultimately turns out original granny cute end off the roast because the pan was too small for the whole one … [paraphrasing an old old cooking joke] Very different from noting that one needs to make sure that the celery is destringed for insert good reason or why that Southern ultra soft flour is required for the recipe to work correctly and a short bit on protein level, gluten formation and other actual real considerations.

18

Of course it is. I’m just saying that those chefs I mentioned became well known for their meticulous research and now every homegrown cook thinks that people want to read their meandering blather on a website.

19

I pretty much skip any without that.

I actually like it when they have a sort of “Here are your pitfalls” section where they talk about substitutes or tricky parts of the cooking as long as it’s to the point, but I can do without the fluff and narrative part.

20

True, but I work with a few different devices and browsers, so it’s easier for me to just remember adding the ‘cooked.wiki/’ prefix.