Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Reading good food writers is the whole point of having good food writers. They can build an evocative sense of the time and place, the sense of why a recipie is the way it is. Its sometimes a personal journey, its sometimes escapism. And yes it changes - Elizabeth David sounds outrageously prissy to modern ears - but food has always been part of human culture, and as we evolve so will our food. Its fine to read the wikipedia "plot" section if you want a shortcut. But its nice to know you can just read the whole book. Slowly.

View on HN

I like the Serious Eats format, where they provide both a brief recipe and an optional backstory. Some of the research and reasoning is interesting for certain recipes (like pressure cooker French Onion soup), though when actually cooking the story makes finding the details a bit more work.

Agreed. I would even be ok with the SE format if they didn't split out the main recipe from the backstory, because with them the backstory is usually something of substance. They often go through multiple iterations, explaining what tweaks they introduced and what the effects were, so that you can understand not only the final recipe but also the principles that went into making it.

That they also give you a quick-and-easy "here's just the recipe" page is just an added bonus, for me.

I love good food writers, but most people who publish recipes online are not good food writers, and SEO tactics lead them to preface their recipes not with information about the development of the recipe or the food's cultural context, but with rambling space-filler about how it's summer now, and how it's nice to eat summer foods in the summer, and there are delicious farm-fresh veggies in the summer, and this summer veggie salad really tastes like summer, and how as a kid the author would also eat veggies in the summer, and how even though the author's husband ("the Truck-Drivin' Man") and their three boys ("Colt, Smith, and Wesson") normally don't like veggies that much, they really love this salad...

Interspersed liberally with enormous high-res photos of the finished product, the ingredients, stock photos of summertime, etc. And because those SEO tricks seem to work, this type of site absolutely dominates the search results for recipes. The recipes are often fine, too (probably because they're frequently cribbed from cookbooks with a few tweaks).

Save it for a read that someone would seek out deliberately for the long-form content though. This wouldn't exist if people loved the long rambling intros about how ever since the 1400s Spaghetti Bolognese has captured the hearts and minds of italians and their diaspora. blah blah blah

I did say good food writers :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com