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It's a running joke in our house. I start off wanting to make some mashed potatoes, and time and time again, I have to suffer through someone's life story--the

It's a running joke in our house. I start off wanting to make some mashed potatoes, and time and time again, I have to suffer through someone's life story--the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream--etc. Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.

pjc50 6y ago
Having thought about this and my own use of cookbooks as loose inspiration rather than actually to follow in detail, I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. In particular, the fluff has value even if you never cook the recipe! Which saves a lot of time and inconvenience on your part while still giving the same warm fluffy feelings. Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated. The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot. (I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site. Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
  - anticsapp 6y ago
    I can't validate this but have been told this by multiple authors and SEO professionals. So it's anecdotal. One blogger apologized to me and told me she was embarrassed doing it but it's an industry practice. She explained it's because other recipe sites use automated scraping tools and republish their recipes in an effort to outrank original authors. The personal fluff helps slow them down. Also, a lot of recipes are bullshit, they manually steal them from elsewhere and change a few variables to evade copyright claims. Although, I guess changing a few variables is how cuisines evolve.
    - kevinmchugh 6y ago
      Recipes aren't copyrightable. It's bad manners to copy and republish one without attribution, but not illegal. The introductory fluff is copyrightable, and that's one reason for it.
      - logfromblammo 6y ago
        Photographs, videos, or drawings of recipes in progress are copyrightable, and usually more helpful. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the recipe is actually viable. That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
    - AnonC 6y ago
      Thanks. This makes sense. I was wondering what these fluff pieces have to do with SEO, because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
      - greglindahl 6y ago
        Yes, search engines monitor result clicks, bounce rates, dwell times, etc. They do affect ranking. And if you have Google analytics on your recipe site, Google has even more data about it.
  - MandieD 6y ago
    I've also read that it's to do with copyright - the recipes themselves can't be copyrighted, but the text around them can. Scraper republishes your ingredients list: not a lot you can do. Scraper republishes your fluffy anecdote and pictures: BLAMMO!
    - nonbirithm 6y ago
      Except the whole reason this article on scraping recipe sites was written was to ignore the fluff. Forcing copyright this way doesn't sound particularly helpful when the fluffy anecdote has so little value in comparison to the recipe. Or is it really the case that the average reader wants the anecode secondary to the recipe? It feels like people are trying to make money around information that is fundamentally impractical to make money off of, so they're forced into doing whatever it takes to make money off of it anyway. "Whatever it takes" is defined by Google yet ruins the user experience, and so that is why recipe sites are this way.
      - mattkrause 6y ago
        I mostly like the pre-recipe text on Smitten Kitchen. Sometimes it's a little rambling, but there's often useful information about the recipe that follows, like shortcuts that seem like they should work, but don't. She includes some interesting links or background, and getting a bite-sized glimpse of someone else's life isn't the worst thing.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    I have done lot of work on cocktails (major brand) and they key is the structured mark-up we are trying some tests on longer form listings ie >200 words. I think that food is much more dispersed apart from super stars like Nigella, Jamie and the BBC so its harder for the average food blogger. Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader. Also don't discount the
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      > Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader. Also don't discount the the what? They got to him, the food bloggers did. WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO TELL US
- pfarrell 6y ago
  It happened to me. When I quizzed my grandmother for her beloved chocolate chip cookies recipe, I felt like being entrusted with a huge family secret. Nope. Toll House cookie recipe (which is on the back of every package) with an extra quarter cup of flour XD.
  - scrozier 6y ago
    I read long ago that you can/should always trust recipes printed on manufacturer's packages; after all, they've chosen them to stake their ingredients' reputations on.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Some of the best stories too have bits of the art inside of the food science anecdotes that contribute to a sense of why a particular variation on a recipe worked better for the author. Some authors have more of a sweet tooth, and others live in higher altitudes or tweak their recipes for camp stoves on hiking trips up the mountains. Some authors spend days and weeks of failures trying to get a proper balance of flour to baking soda/baking powder for just the exact sort of yeast rise they want from their dough, and others just wing it let the dough live or crumble as nature intends as it adds a little chaos to the whimsy and art of their eventual plating. It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time. Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.
thawaway1837 6y ago
“Why doesn’t everyone who is putting information out there for free not cater to exactly my needs”. What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it. And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  It's a sweet world view, but the truth is that the majority of these cooking sites are filling in content for SEO and ad purposes, and the "stories" are fictions written by Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
  - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
    And, the real farce is that Google mistakenly sees all that scrolling up and down the page, looking for the recipe as 'engagement' and "Dwell time".
    - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
      Is that mistaken? Does no one click on ads on the page while doing this?
      - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
        the algo thinks you're having a good time.
  - csa 6y ago
    This is so incredibly accurate.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
jackewiehose 6y ago
> Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have something like that in English?
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I usually add "BBC" to my search term, which ① gets a straightforward page and ② ensures the measurements and oven temperatures will be metric. The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
  - jackewiehose 6y ago
    > I usually add "BBC" to my search term Do you mean at chefkoch- or google-search? Yes, recipes are very hard to translate. For example I don't know what "cream" is and I never want extra sugar or salt in canned tomatoes.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      I mean in Google search, or any other general web search. It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.
onion2k 6y ago
mashed potatoes Steam some potatoes. (Don't boil them. No one wants watery mash.) Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.) Add salt and pepper. (No, more than that. You've under-seasoned them.) Mash them until they're the consistency you want. (For really smooth mash use an electric hand mixer instead of a masher.) To make them better still, put lots of wholegrain mustard or garlic in with the butter.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- galfarragem 6y ago
  I would buy a cooking book with recipes explained like this one. With real world tricks and explaining "why" you do it in that way. A raw list of ingredients is, in my opinion, almost useless.
  - gbear605 6y ago
    I’ve found that The New Best Recipe cookbook covers this pretty well for me. They have an introduction to each recipe talking about all the variants they tried, and then there’s a clearly marked recipe section.
  - csa 6y ago
    America’s Test Kitchen (TV) / Cooks Illustrated (books) will scratch your itch. My foodie friend and I use a lot of their recipes. The cool thing is that sometimes you will disagree with their preferences (totally normal), so you can use one of their variants that has the attributes that you want. Or similarly, you can see how changing certain ingredients changes the outcome and personalize your version of the recipe accordingly. It definitely saves some experimental batches.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  Since this seems to be an OK thread to add humor to, I'll point out you can also stick 'em in a stew.
wolco 6y ago
I have one. It doesn't rank after 15 years.
reaperducer 6y ago
Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards. There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.
goatforce5 6y ago
I've had good luck with recipes from https://www.taste.com.au/ https://www.taste.com.au/ and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.") "Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."

pjc50 6y ago

Having thought about this and my own use of cookbooks as loose inspiration rather than actually to follow in detail, I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. In particular, the fluff has value even if you never cook the recipe! Which saves a lot of time and inconvenience on your part while still giving the same warm fluffy feelings. Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated. The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot. (I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)

dvtrn 6y ago
I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site. Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
- anticsapp 6y ago
  I can't validate this but have been told this by multiple authors and SEO professionals. So it's anecdotal. One blogger apologized to me and told me she was embarrassed doing it but it's an industry practice. She explained it's because other recipe sites use automated scraping tools and republish their recipes in an effort to outrank original authors. The personal fluff helps slow them down. Also, a lot of recipes are bullshit, they manually steal them from elsewhere and change a few variables to evade copyright claims. Although, I guess changing a few variables is how cuisines evolve.
  - kevinmchugh 6y ago
    Recipes aren't copyrightable. It's bad manners to copy and republish one without attribution, but not illegal. The introductory fluff is copyrightable, and that's one reason for it.
    - logfromblammo 6y ago
      Photographs, videos, or drawings of recipes in progress are copyrightable, and usually more helpful. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the recipe is actually viable. That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
  - AnonC 6y ago
    Thanks. This makes sense. I was wondering what these fluff pieces have to do with SEO, because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
    - greglindahl 6y ago
      Yes, search engines monitor result clicks, bounce rates, dwell times, etc. They do affect ranking. And if you have Google analytics on your recipe site, Google has even more data about it.
- MandieD 6y ago
  I've also read that it's to do with copyright - the recipes themselves can't be copyrighted, but the text around them can. Scraper republishes your ingredients list: not a lot you can do. Scraper republishes your fluffy anecdote and pictures: BLAMMO!
  - nonbirithm 6y ago
    Except the whole reason this article on scraping recipe sites was written was to ignore the fluff. Forcing copyright this way doesn't sound particularly helpful when the fluffy anecdote has so little value in comparison to the recipe. Or is it really the case that the average reader wants the anecode secondary to the recipe? It feels like people are trying to make money around information that is fundamentally impractical to make money off of, so they're forced into doing whatever it takes to make money off of it anyway. "Whatever it takes" is defined by Google yet ruins the user experience, and so that is why recipe sites are this way.
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      I mostly like the pre-recipe text on Smitten Kitchen. Sometimes it's a little rambling, but there's often useful information about the recipe that follows, like shortcuts that seem like they should work, but don't. She includes some interesting links or background, and getting a bite-sized glimpse of someone else's life isn't the worst thing.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  I have done lot of work on cocktails (major brand) and they key is the structured mark-up we are trying some tests on longer form listings ie >200 words. I think that food is much more dispersed apart from super stars like Nigella, Jamie and the BBC so its harder for the average food blogger. Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader. Also don't discount the
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    > Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader. Also don't discount the the what? They got to him, the food bloggers did. WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO TELL US
pfarrell 6y ago
It happened to me. When I quizzed my grandmother for her beloved chocolate chip cookies recipe, I felt like being entrusted with a huge family secret. Nope. Toll House cookie recipe (which is on the back of every package) with an extra quarter cup of flour XD.
- scrozier 6y ago
  I read long ago that you can/should always trust recipes printed on manufacturer's packages; after all, they've chosen them to stake their ingredients' reputations on.
WorldMaker 6y ago
Some of the best stories too have bits of the art inside of the food science anecdotes that contribute to a sense of why a particular variation on a recipe worked better for the author. Some authors have more of a sweet tooth, and others live in higher altitudes or tweak their recipes for camp stoves on hiking trips up the mountains. Some authors spend days and weeks of failures trying to get a proper balance of flour to baking soda/baking powder for just the exact sort of yeast rise they want from their dough, and others just wing it let the dough live or crumble as nature intends as it adds a little chaos to the whimsy and art of their eventual plating. It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time. Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.

thawaway1837 6y ago

“Why doesn’t everyone who is putting information out there for free not cater to exactly my needs”. What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it. And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.

scrollaway 6y ago
It's a sweet world view, but the truth is that the majority of these cooking sites are filling in content for SEO and ad purposes, and the "stories" are fictions written by Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
- thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
  And, the real farce is that Google mistakenly sees all that scrolling up and down the page, looking for the recipe as 'engagement' and "Dwell time".
  - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    Is that mistaken? Does no one click on ads on the page while doing this?
    - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
      the algo thinks you're having a good time.
- csa 6y ago
  This is so incredibly accurate.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago

jackewiehose 6y ago

> Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have something like that in English?

Symbiote 6y ago
I usually add "BBC" to my search term, which ① gets a straightforward page and ② ensures the measurements and oven temperatures will be metric. The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
- jackewiehose 6y ago
  > I usually add "BBC" to my search term Do you mean at chefkoch- or google-search? Yes, recipes are very hard to translate. For example I don't know what "cream" is and I never want extra sugar or salt in canned tomatoes.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    I mean in Google search, or any other general web search. It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.

onion2k 6y ago

mashed potatoes Steam some potatoes. (Don't boil them. No one wants watery mash.) Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.) Add salt and pepper. (No, more than that. You've under-seasoned them.) Mash them until they're the consistency you want. (For really smooth mash use an electric hand mixer instead of a masher.) To make them better still, put lots of wholegrain mustard or garlic in with the butter.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
galfarragem 6y ago
I would buy a cooking book with recipes explained like this one. With real world tricks and explaining "why" you do it in that way. A raw list of ingredients is, in my opinion, almost useless.
- gbear605 6y ago
  I’ve found that The New Best Recipe cookbook covers this pretty well for me. They have an introduction to each recipe talking about all the variants they tried, and then there’s a clearly marked recipe section.
- csa 6y ago
  America’s Test Kitchen (TV) / Cooks Illustrated (books) will scratch your itch. My foodie friend and I use a lot of their recipes. The cool thing is that sometimes you will disagree with their preferences (totally normal), so you can use one of their variants that has the attributes that you want. Or similarly, you can see how changing certain ingredients changes the outcome and personalize your version of the recipe accordingly. It definitely saves some experimental batches.
pugworthy 6y ago
Since this seems to be an OK thread to add humor to, I'll point out you can also stick 'em in a stew.

wolco 6y ago

I have one. It doesn't rank after 15 years.

reaperducer 6y ago

Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards. There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.

goatforce5 6y ago

I've had good luck with recipes from https://www.taste.com.au/ https://www.taste.com.au/ and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.") "Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."