Don’t Jump Straight to the Recipe
Last night, I noticed several of my cooking colleagues tweeted about Recipeasly, a website that briefly promised to “fix” online recipes by removing cultural context, narrative, or any information other than the ingredient list and / or instructions. In a promotional tweet sent out to the world by Tom Redman (that’s what everyone shouted), he used a photo of the Serious Eats cherry pie recipe as an example of a recipe that deserves such a breach. Big mistake. Huge. (The site is currently down, the home page has been replaced with a note of apology .)
I could explain in detail why this “idea” is actually a form of content theft, but Helen Rosner has already explained this on Twitter . However, I have found that people usually do not care about the exploitation of other people’s labor if the end result is more convenient for them. But the truth is, it is usually in the best interest of the recipe reader to read whatever comes before the recipe, since this is where the real discussion takes place.
But first, let’s talk about how incredibly stupid it was to use a recipe designed and written by the incomparable Stella Parks – the absolute worst example Tom could have used to promote his site with content-stealing bots. (Is it a bot? I don’t think I know what a bot is.) First, if Tom had ever read anything on Serious Eats, he would have known that they almost always publish a great detailed guide on the subject. at hand, along with a separate recipe , making Tom’s little tool useless. But even if Serious Eats did not publish their content in this way, it would be unwise to skip the pre-recipe material, since this is where the author usually explains his methodology. Yes, Parks includes a funny introduction about Twin Peaks (because we’re talking cherry pie), but the article is very awkward to read without an introduction. More important, however, is Parks’ detailed discussion of the behavior of starch and sugar, as well as a touch of thermodynamic theory that explains why she chose the ingredients she chose and why she uses them in the stated proportions.
By no means does Parks mention his grandmother — enemy # 1 among recipe readers — but even if she did, it would be a mistake to skip over all of these words, which are not technically a recipe. (Personally, I will never stop mentioning my grandmother, a woman who hated to cook, but she had to do it every day and therefore developed a lot of “tricks” to make the task easier.) Although the home cook should n’t know why the author of the recipes made the decisions they did to fulfill this recipe, it certainly helps. In the case of Parks Cherry Pie, precisely in the non-recipe paragraphs, she explains the importance of using tapioca starch and the need for a 4: 1 fruit to sugar ratio. Without this “theory,” some home cooks may be tempted to use more common cornstarch. or a little more (or less) sugar, and their cakes will be worse for it. Then Parks is probably to blame. If my emails taught me anything, it’s that recipe errors are always the recipe’s fault, even when the reader doesn’t follow the written instructions.
My style is different from Parks, but the same reasoning applies to everything you can read on Skillet. I don’t write “recipes” so much as “guides” and “tips”, but if I do include a recipe in one of my blogs, that is usually the least important part. Everything that precedes the recipe is – again – where I explain my reasoning and how I came to do it this way. The recipe is usually just an example of how you could use whatever “hack” I’m talking about in a specific way, but earlier paragraphs usually contain broader appendices and also outline what you shouldn’t be doing.
Hating culinary writers for talking about their families or their lives is not a new trend. About twice a year, someone’s tweet about boring jokes about matriarchs goes viral, and every time it gets tiresome. It’s also worth noting that Tom Redman’s instrument is not as new as he claims. As noted in Twitter our own AA Newton, this tool has existed since 2013 – Lifehacker even wrote about it then, even before any of the current employees got here. (Full disclosure: I once wrote about a Chrome extension that lets you navigate to a recipe on a blog, although it didn’t work very well and still gave the blogger a “click”. I’m embarrassed that I posted it, but I probably did it’s only because it was quickly written and we tend to cover Chrome extensions. Anyway, I wish I did, and I cringe when I look at it now.)
Anyway. Scrolling is not difficult, and many sites and blogs have a “go to recipe” feature. If you really despise not even seeing (free) anecdotes and (free) theory, before you get into the (free) recipe, I suggest you buy cookbooks, readable writers whose words you actually like, or try to come up with your own the damned’s own recipes. It might give you a little more appreciation for the recipe authors – what they do and the grandmothers who made them what they are today.
Updated 1/3/2021 at 2:10 PM ET to correct Redman’s name as Tom, not Tod.