That sort of recipe blog hasn't happened just for SEO. It's also a bit of a "two audiences" problem: if you are coming to that food blogger from a search you certainly would prefer the recipe first and then maybe any commentary on it below if the recipe looks good. If you are a regular reader of that food blogger you are probably invested in the stories up top and that parasocial connection and the recipes themselves are sometimes incidental to why you are a regular reader.

You see some of that "two readers" divide sometimes even in classic cookbooks, where "celebrity" chefs of the day might spend much of a cookbook on a long rambling memoir. Admittedly such books were generally well indexed and had table of contents to jump right to the recipes or particular recipes, but the concept of "long personal ramble of what these recipes mean to me" is an old one in cookbooks too.