I like the story behind food/recipes- I obviously subscribe here, the sites I get recipes from typically have a story (or in the case of Serious Eats, a small encyclopedia) attached, I changed my major in college partly because I loved Good Eats. I remember a few years back, someone shared a grandmother’s recipe (bread maybe?) where I don’t remember what the recipe was but the story was so well told.
My irritation is when the “story” is “it was easy, my kids and/or spouse ate a surprising amount, would eat again”. There isn’t a story to actually tell (that’s a comment you leave on the recipe’s Facebook post, not a story), there is only a recipe, but we’re acting otherwise. (It doesn’t help that in these situations, the writing is in the same tone as most parenting blogs and messages recruiting you into an MLM).
Those pieces can factor into a good story (and frequently do here at ACB), but there’s a wide difference between “these chicken tenders were yummo” and a trip to AC’s to see Barb, or dissertation on the use of various flours in coating and their effects on crunch in fried foods.
The just the recipe folks are the same ones that cry about the reply all emails or that they no longer want to be on a listserv. Please look at me as I take my time to make you address me individually even though there are buttons that have words to skip, unsubscribe, delete quite prevalent on them but you need someone to hold your hand.
I gave my brother a recipe last night for baked potatoes, it was mostly the season mix I use on the skins. But he got the recipe but also a lengthy explanation as to what the instructions really mean, coat v cover, dust v shake. It's like the family recipes that are handwritten and barely legible but unless you cooked it 100 times it will never taste right because there is always something missing.
And truthfully, those that just want the recipe don't deserve to find the happiness in the food that they make. They can just look at it as a mechanical repetitive chore and eat their grey and brown food without the enjoyment of knowing where the recipe came from. And the particular individual who tweeted work for public broadcasting and you know, I'd rather just have a skip button to get back to my kid's TV show instead of listening to a pledge drive.
and let’s also remember that most of these sites are paying freelancers by the word for their recipe contributions and, if they skipped the story, they might get $25 instead of $100. if you’re complaining about the story, why do you hate labor and side with the owners?
Your footnote just gave away the entire game, Scott. And it's 1000% elephants correct. Also, I move to officially rename this thing "Al Gore’s Disgruntlement Machine."
This is only tangentially related, but recipes cannot be copyrighted, because the law considers them just a factual list of steps and ingredients. However, the photos, head notes, and other original context written around the recipe can be considered IP and can fall under copyright laws, which may provide another incentive (in addition to SEO!) for recipe writers and food bloggers to include their own stories and flourishes along with the actual recipe.
Anyway, this NYT article from a couple months ago explains this in much more detail:
Well said. The way some people react you would think it causes them real, physical pain to scroll down a page.
I have come to appreciate the stories because they often times give a window into who the food blogger is, which can help determine if I should check out their other recipes, and in some cases help decide whether or not I want to support them with more clicks/views.
I'm not a good cook or an adventurous cook, but I do suppose I would improve with practice and commitment, both of which I do not feel like I have time for right now. HOWEVER, I appreciative of the craft of food, those who seek ways to make things that are delicious and in many cases innovative, and I do appreciate the willingness of those folks to share their stories because, as you said, this is a new form of storytelling, a form of oral tradition, but with a different focus on what the mouth is doing.
Your explanation of why stories attached to recipes are important is very convincing to me. I also agree strongly with your recommendation that people who don't like them should just scroll to the recipe, which I do when all I want is the recipe.
I would just add that there seems to be something about the whole interwebs thing that irritates the heck out of lots of people these days. I know they're just trying to get something off their chests, but (just as I feel when I run into these people in meat space) I wish they would do that by yelling at their bathroom mirrors or torturing their teddy bears or something and leave me alone.
People love to glance past the UX and SEO issues with recipe links though.
Yes, the writer may like to share that content.
Yes, search engines REQUIRE that content in order for it to rank.
Yes, the content writers should be paid well for that content.
But that alone doesn't make a good end product.
These recipe sites are all just advertising machines. The ad bucks come first and the user comes last.
If they cared at all about the user, they would, as you mention and as some sites have already, clearly link to the recipe at the beginning. They would get rid of all pop-up ads and interstitials, as those are quickly becoming a thing of the past and may actually be impeding their SEO. They can advertise with impeding the user.
And what's more is that many recipe sites actually do this well on desktop! Then you go to mobile and it's a minefield. And mobile is where the user is MOST pressed to access the recipe quickly, either because they are grocery shopping or because they are making the recipe and using their phone to follow along.
I've got to say, the "LET BLOGGERS BLOG!" responses are growing just as maddening as the hot takes themselves. It's basically akin to screaming that The Homer is actually a good car.
Exactly, the only thing worse than complaining about something you get for free is complaining about a TV show you don't even watch.
There *is* a site called RecipeSource which is just an archive of recipes, no stories, no popups, etc. It's very comprehensive but some of the recipes are short on instructions and none of them have pictures. If you want your damn hash brown soup recipe without the digital gingerbread, though, it's there.
Is this a variation on "cooks vs. bakers?" I know I get so much more satisfaction and good results when I understand the soul or aesthetic of a food. Hard to put into words but those stories help you understand where the other person is coming from and what they're trying to accomplish with what they have. And I can think of dozens of examples where understanding the soul/aesthetic has nothing to do with if the recipe is complex or authentic or fancy or simple. Bill Buford's "Heat" has probably 100 pages on making polenta and pasta: read that and you'll make those foods 1000x better than you did before. Maybe the cooks want (need?) that and the bakers just want "add cornmeal to water, stir" and "add egg to flour, knead?"
I like the story behind food/recipes- I obviously subscribe here, the sites I get recipes from typically have a story (or in the case of Serious Eats, a small encyclopedia) attached, I changed my major in college partly because I loved Good Eats. I remember a few years back, someone shared a grandmother’s recipe (bread maybe?) where I don’t remember what the recipe was but the story was so well told.
My irritation is when the “story” is “it was easy, my kids and/or spouse ate a surprising amount, would eat again”. There isn’t a story to actually tell (that’s a comment you leave on the recipe’s Facebook post, not a story), there is only a recipe, but we’re acting otherwise. (It doesn’t help that in these situations, the writing is in the same tone as most parenting blogs and messages recruiting you into an MLM).
Those pieces can factor into a good story (and frequently do here at ACB), but there’s a wide difference between “these chicken tenders were yummo” and a trip to AC’s to see Barb, or dissertation on the use of various flours in coating and their effects on crunch in fried foods.
The just the recipe folks are the same ones that cry about the reply all emails or that they no longer want to be on a listserv. Please look at me as I take my time to make you address me individually even though there are buttons that have words to skip, unsubscribe, delete quite prevalent on them but you need someone to hold your hand.
I gave my brother a recipe last night for baked potatoes, it was mostly the season mix I use on the skins. But he got the recipe but also a lengthy explanation as to what the instructions really mean, coat v cover, dust v shake. It's like the family recipes that are handwritten and barely legible but unless you cooked it 100 times it will never taste right because there is always something missing.
And truthfully, those that just want the recipe don't deserve to find the happiness in the food that they make. They can just look at it as a mechanical repetitive chore and eat their grey and brown food without the enjoyment of knowing where the recipe came from. And the particular individual who tweeted work for public broadcasting and you know, I'd rather just have a skip button to get back to my kid's TV show instead of listening to a pledge drive.
and let’s also remember that most of these sites are paying freelancers by the word for their recipe contributions and, if they skipped the story, they might get $25 instead of $100. if you’re complaining about the story, why do you hate labor and side with the owners?
Your footnote just gave away the entire game, Scott. And it's 1000% elephants correct. Also, I move to officially rename this thing "Al Gore’s Disgruntlement Machine."
ok but i just googled hash brown soup tho
This is only tangentially related, but recipes cannot be copyrighted, because the law considers them just a factual list of steps and ingredients. However, the photos, head notes, and other original context written around the recipe can be considered IP and can fall under copyright laws, which may provide another incentive (in addition to SEO!) for recipe writers and food bloggers to include their own stories and flourishes along with the actual recipe.
Anyway, this NYT article from a couple months ago explains this in much more detail:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/dining/recipe-theft-cookbook-plagiarism.html
Well said. The way some people react you would think it causes them real, physical pain to scroll down a page.
I have come to appreciate the stories because they often times give a window into who the food blogger is, which can help determine if I should check out their other recipes, and in some cases help decide whether or not I want to support them with more clicks/views.
This is beautiful in its way, Scott.
I'm not a good cook or an adventurous cook, but I do suppose I would improve with practice and commitment, both of which I do not feel like I have time for right now. HOWEVER, I appreciative of the craft of food, those who seek ways to make things that are delicious and in many cases innovative, and I do appreciate the willingness of those folks to share their stories because, as you said, this is a new form of storytelling, a form of oral tradition, but with a different focus on what the mouth is doing.
Your explanation of why stories attached to recipes are important is very convincing to me. I also agree strongly with your recommendation that people who don't like them should just scroll to the recipe, which I do when all I want is the recipe.
I would just add that there seems to be something about the whole interwebs thing that irritates the heck out of lots of people these days. I know they're just trying to get something off their chests, but (just as I feel when I run into these people in meat space) I wish they would do that by yelling at their bathroom mirrors or torturing their teddy bears or something and leave me alone.
It's really weird to have an article targeted directly at you for an opinion you've only ever thought and not expressed.
To be clear, it's exactly like you say. It's not when I'm reading your newsletter. It's when I googled a recipe for sirloin cap or something
People love to glance past the UX and SEO issues with recipe links though.
Yes, the writer may like to share that content.
Yes, search engines REQUIRE that content in order for it to rank.
Yes, the content writers should be paid well for that content.
But that alone doesn't make a good end product.
These recipe sites are all just advertising machines. The ad bucks come first and the user comes last.
If they cared at all about the user, they would, as you mention and as some sites have already, clearly link to the recipe at the beginning. They would get rid of all pop-up ads and interstitials, as those are quickly becoming a thing of the past and may actually be impeding their SEO. They can advertise with impeding the user.
And what's more is that many recipe sites actually do this well on desktop! Then you go to mobile and it's a minefield. And mobile is where the user is MOST pressed to access the recipe quickly, either because they are grocery shopping or because they are making the recipe and using their phone to follow along.
I've got to say, the "LET BLOGGERS BLOG!" responses are growing just as maddening as the hot takes themselves. It's basically akin to screaming that The Homer is actually a good car.
Exactly, the only thing worse than complaining about something you get for free is complaining about a TV show you don't even watch.
There *is* a site called RecipeSource which is just an archive of recipes, no stories, no popups, etc. It's very comprehensive but some of the recipes are short on instructions and none of them have pictures. If you want your damn hash brown soup recipe without the digital gingerbread, though, it's there.
Foodspin used to include a just-the-recipe link that took you to a gif of a masturbating bear, and I gotta say I loved it then and I love it now.
Is this a variation on "cooks vs. bakers?" I know I get so much more satisfaction and good results when I understand the soul or aesthetic of a food. Hard to put into words but those stories help you understand where the other person is coming from and what they're trying to accomplish with what they have. And I can think of dozens of examples where understanding the soul/aesthetic has nothing to do with if the recipe is complex or authentic or fancy or simple. Bill Buford's "Heat" has probably 100 pages on making polenta and pasta: read that and you'll make those foods 1000x better than you did before. Maybe the cooks want (need?) that and the bakers just want "add cornmeal to water, stir" and "add egg to flour, knead?"
I must have that hot sauce soup!