Well to me there's two distinct types of background: 1. Background directly related to the recipe/cooking in general. 2. The writer's personal anecdotes tange

Well to me there's two distinct types of background: 1. Background directly related to the recipe/cooking in general. 2. The writer's personal anecdotes tangentially related to the recipe. Some cooking blogs have great background (eg. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's work on Serious Eats) but I would say they're mostly type 1 - information that informs you about the recipe, how they developed it, technique etc. They have type 2 background as well (jokes, what inspired them to make the recipe, snippets of their day-to-day lives) but it's definitely a small proportion of the body of the text. These blogs always have background that's work reading. What I can't stand is the blogs with reams and reams of text of nothing but personal anecdotes, meandering stories, media references, what their kids are up to etc etc, occasionally returning to talk about something to do with the recipe. I don't have any examples because I now avoid untrusted recipe blogs like the plague, but it becomes very obvious to me when a recipe blog strays from useful background to worthless padding for the sake of copyright and SEO.