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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

This is great, but it seems to be missing the requisite 5000 word backstory detailing the author's summer trips to their grandma's farmhouse where the recipe originated or the vacation to a foreign land where the author had a personal encounter with the dish's chef who, after much cajoling, revealed the secret recipe. Without the backstory, each recipe feels ungrounded and detached from time, place, and even reality itself.

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My particular favourite of this genre is "Maple Shortbread Bars" from The New York Times which starts with the opening "Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001"

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread...

My neighbor had 1940s Joy of Cooking, which in itself was probably one of the first every recipe, for the most part, just works cookbooks. Between rationing and more important not spoiling when sending cookies from the US to soldiers fighting on the front lines, many cookie recipes were without butter.

Outside of a story like that, there is no reason to include war in your recipe. Cooking is about nurturing and sustaining homeostasis. There is something fundamentally wrong about taking other people's suffering and making it about one self -- it is narcissistic which spoils like cookies made with butter after several weeks of travel.

Oh, it's worse than you think. It's not just "taking other people's suffering and making it about oneself." It's often purely SEO. Recipes get ranked higher when they are preceded by long, "engaging" introductions that nobody reads but that use keywords and address common questions (Like "can I substitute ingredients?). Often the longwinded introductions you see aren't the result of narcissism but of thoughtless SEO.

I haven't laughed that hard in a while, WOW. I genuinely wonder if people believe this or if it's necessary fluff to sell.

On the normal food blogger pages it is fluff to make room for ads or to get people to misclick on the ads while trying to get to (or back to; the scroll changes feel intentional too) the actual recipe bit. Super effective, especially with people using mobile and trying to scroll with one finger while cooking.

A ton of these sites were bought up and they all look the same now and run the multiple floating ads, especially a wide banner at the -bottom- which is a perfect misclick monetizer.

I thought it's because there's no copyright possible on recipes, but there is on the fluff writing...

I don't know if it's to prevent mass theft of content (oh no, the thieves would have to go through the text and cut off the stories. Although nowadays the biggest IP thieves have built systems to automate this..)

The purpose of the website is to sell ad space. The recipe brings you to the site. The story keeps you there longer and makes more space for more ads.

Abstemiousness, I think, is not an option when you're trying to sell.

TBF, the recipe starts on the first screen for me, so that's a huge improvement over 99% of the recipes on the internet...

Hahaha - I made my own website to mock these ones: https://matthewquerzoli.com/#/projects/internet-recipe

It took me way too long to realize it has infinite scroll and keeps repeating, bravo!

The fact that I couldn't scroll to the actual recipe was infuriating. You're despicable!

Someone already registered the domain jumptorecipe.com but hasn't done anything with it. We can only dream.

A while ago the developer of Mela showed up in a comment here on HN, and I’ve been in love with that app ever since:

https://mela.recipes

Not only has it a built-in recipe browser that will immediately extract the recipe from websites, but it can also OCR them from cookbook photos!

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