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Recipes on the internet are the worst mess, thousands of recipes for yellow cake that differ in ingredients and quantities for no discernable reason, someone's

Recipes on the internet are the worst mess, thousands of recipes for yellow cake that differ in ingredients and quantities for no discernable reason, someone's recipe for spanish rice made with taco bell sauce packets, macaroni and cheese with more mayonnaise then macaroni and cheese combined, and now the bloggers where you have to read through six pages of how the author used to make the recipe with their departed grandmother before getting to anything of substance. Instead I bought a used 1950's Betty Crocker cookbook from a used book store, beats Google every time.

h2odragon 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking
- jakebasile 4y ago
  I bought a copy of this for $20 recently. It has not failed me yet.
- bregma 4y ago
  That one hasn't been the same since newer editions took out the illustrated how-to-skin-a-squirrel entry.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    First catch your tiger.
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      substituting ingredients in recipes is a thing, but you can only stretch so far. how many recipes for tiger are there, anyway? i can't really see it working in place of squirrel except maybe in sausage and Squirrel Surprise
qbasic_forever 4y ago
The problem with old cookbooks is that ingredients and tastes change dramatically over the years. Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork. Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity. Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.
- ben7799 4y ago
  Joy of cooking has been updated many times since 1950. The editions from 30 years ago already had changes and guidance related to the changes in the way pork is raised/bred/produced. All those Aspic & gross molded meat recipes were banished from mainstream cookbooks 40+ years ago too. The internet recipes certainly don't take this kind of thing into account. Lots of them are bad versions of recipes that were plagiarized from famous cookbooks, which changes that don't make sense or issues that you will discover if you follow the recipe. Many of these recipe blogs are not interested in quality of the recipe, just quality of the SEO and getting their ad dollars. They are also certainly not interested in keeping the recipe healthy since they are probably not actually making the food from the recipe and eating it. You can do far better with an actual cookbook. I think the actual recipes on the internet are probably all just content farm nonsense. ChatGPT is probably really useful for writing the nonsense stuff at the top of the blog that helps with SEO!
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    No one mentioned Joy of Cooking here, and you glossed over my recommendation to get a cookbook from recent decades (not the 50s!)... like an updated version of The Joy of Cooking.
andrewjmg 4y ago
it's the effect of years of unchecked SEO monopoly from Google. I hope ChatGPT can change that in some way or other.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nicksrose7224 4y ago
  try asking for chocolate chip cookie recipe on chatgpt, it works awesome already. The only issue i see is I can't verify in general if the recipe is accurate (like all things ChatGpt outputs). But these cookies i just happen to know are correct
  - zxcvbn4038 4y ago
    Maybe chatgpt can fix the anarchist cookbook?
  - ttyprintk 4y ago
    ‘Cooking for Geeks’ chocolate chip cookie recipe arrives at an optimum among many input variations.
sharperguy 4y ago
ChatGPT can be a nice alternative to googling. It will just give you the recipe without the nonsense, and you can ask it to convert the units, suggest replacements for ingredients if you don't have / can't eat them etc.
- michaericalribo 4y ago
  With the downside that if you ask it to include iron nails in the recipe, it will gladly do so :)
jabroni_salad 4y ago
> for no discernable reason This is why I really like Food Labs. This cookie recipe is the most famous example: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip... They bake hundreds of cookies with different quantities of ingredient to show the effect that each ingredient has in the baking process. So now not only do you know what somebody's recipe is, but you also know exactly how to modify it to suit your own tastes.
imiric 4y ago
Recipes are not just algorithms for cooking food, despite also being a sequence of steps. They can vary by culture and personal preference. The most experienced chefs cook by sense, don't follow precise measurements, and often experiment by changing ingredients or amounts in different ways. This makes dishes interesting, and you learn what works and what doesn't in the process. There's no optimal way to prepare food. Once you've found a recipe that you enjoy, save it, remix it, and share it with someone else. If a 1950s cookbook works for you, that's great, but you'd be missing out on a lot of good food if you only follow recipes from a single, static source. Maybe even that meandering blogger is worth reading; otherwise there are many tools out there that could extract just the gist for you.
RichardCA 4y ago
Pro Tip: The 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the one you want. It's the closest thing to a "reference manual for food" that anyone has ever done. When I was in my 20's I was able to teach myself how to roast a turkey by looking it up in the index and then doing exactly what the book said. Ditto for the Candied Yams, which I still get compliments on. Every single recipe was tested in a kitchen similar to what an average household would have had at that time. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vintage-joy-of-cooking-cookbook-shopping https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vintage-joy-of-cooking-cook...
joezydeco 4y ago
You haven't experienced recipe hell until you have a child that runs up to you with a 10-second TikTok video and says "We need to make this!". No ingredient list, no measurements, no temperatures, no times. Good luck.
- ropable 4y ago
  As a counterpoint: I've had quite a lot of fun trying to determine a workable recipe with my teenage daughter from a short TikTok vid. It tends to involve a lot of screenshots and trial-and-error.

h2odragon 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_of_Cooking

jakebasile 4y ago
I bought a copy of this for $20 recently. It has not failed me yet.
bregma 4y ago
That one hasn't been the same since newer editions took out the illustrated how-to-skin-a-squirrel entry.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  First catch your tiger.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    substituting ingredients in recipes is a thing, but you can only stretch so far. how many recipes for tiger are there, anyway? i can't really see it working in place of squirrel except maybe in sausage and Squirrel Surprise

qbasic_forever 4y ago

The problem with old cookbooks is that ingredients and tastes change dramatically over the years. Pork for example in the 50s was way, way different than pork today--in the 70s and 80s pork producers decided pork had a bad reputation and bred pigs to be leaner with less fat so it would be sold as healthy food (remember the slogan, 'Pork: the other white meat'?). So if you had pork chops in the 50s they were much fattier and better tasting, almost like steak, vs. what you get today. A tomato meat sauce from that era might have you just use fat pork chunks instead of beef and if you make that same recipe to the letter today you'll just get dry nasty shredded pork. Another example is jello and aspic. In the 60s jello was new and turned into a fad to make aspic-like dishes, basically meat inside a rich and hearty congealed fat. If you look at cookbooks of that era you'll see all kinds of horrifying things like tuna fish in jello--it was novel at the time but now a curiosity. Old cookbooks are fun but IMHO I would stick with stuff from recent decades.

ben7799 4y ago
Joy of cooking has been updated many times since 1950. The editions from 30 years ago already had changes and guidance related to the changes in the way pork is raised/bred/produced. All those Aspic & gross molded meat recipes were banished from mainstream cookbooks 40+ years ago too. The internet recipes certainly don't take this kind of thing into account. Lots of them are bad versions of recipes that were plagiarized from famous cookbooks, which changes that don't make sense or issues that you will discover if you follow the recipe. Many of these recipe blogs are not interested in quality of the recipe, just quality of the SEO and getting their ad dollars. They are also certainly not interested in keeping the recipe healthy since they are probably not actually making the food from the recipe and eating it. You can do far better with an actual cookbook. I think the actual recipes on the internet are probably all just content farm nonsense. ChatGPT is probably really useful for writing the nonsense stuff at the top of the blog that helps with SEO!
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  No one mentioned Joy of Cooking here, and you glossed over my recommendation to get a cookbook from recent decades (not the 50s!)... like an updated version of The Joy of Cooking.

andrewjmg 4y ago

it's the effect of years of unchecked SEO monopoly from Google. I hope ChatGPT can change that in some way or other.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nicksrose7224 4y ago
try asking for chocolate chip cookie recipe on chatgpt, it works awesome already. The only issue i see is I can't verify in general if the recipe is accurate (like all things ChatGpt outputs). But these cookies i just happen to know are correct
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  Maybe chatgpt can fix the anarchist cookbook?
- ttyprintk 4y ago
  ‘Cooking for Geeks’ chocolate chip cookie recipe arrives at an optimum among many input variations.

sharperguy 4y ago

ChatGPT can be a nice alternative to googling. It will just give you the recipe without the nonsense, and you can ask it to convert the units, suggest replacements for ingredients if you don't have / can't eat them etc.

michaericalribo 4y ago
With the downside that if you ask it to include iron nails in the recipe, it will gladly do so :)

jabroni_salad 4y ago

> for no discernable reason This is why I really like Food Labs. This cookie recipe is the most famous example: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip... They bake hundreds of cookies with different quantities of ingredient to show the effect that each ingredient has in the baking process. So now not only do you know what somebody's recipe is, but you also know exactly how to modify it to suit your own tastes.

imiric 4y ago

Recipes are not just algorithms for cooking food, despite also being a sequence of steps. They can vary by culture and personal preference. The most experienced chefs cook by sense, don't follow precise measurements, and often experiment by changing ingredients or amounts in different ways. This makes dishes interesting, and you learn what works and what doesn't in the process. There's no optimal way to prepare food. Once you've found a recipe that you enjoy, save it, remix it, and share it with someone else. If a 1950s cookbook works for you, that's great, but you'd be missing out on a lot of good food if you only follow recipes from a single, static source. Maybe even that meandering blogger is worth reading; otherwise there are many tools out there that could extract just the gist for you.

RichardCA 4y ago

Pro Tip: The 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the one you want. It's the closest thing to a "reference manual for food" that anyone has ever done. When I was in my 20's I was able to teach myself how to roast a turkey by looking it up in the index and then doing exactly what the book said. Ditto for the Candied Yams, which I still get compliments on. Every single recipe was tested in a kitchen similar to what an average household would have had at that time. https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vintage-joy-of-cooking-cookbook-shopping https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vintage-joy-of-cooking-cook...

joezydeco 4y ago

You haven't experienced recipe hell until you have a child that runs up to you with a 10-second TikTok video and says "We need to make this!". No ingredient list, no measurements, no temperatures, no times. Good luck.

ropable 4y ago
As a counterpoint: I've had quite a lot of fun trying to determine a workable recipe with my teenage daughter from a short TikTok vid. It tends to involve a lot of screenshots and trial-and-error.