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What's the place of a cookbook writer in an Epicurious world? Finding a recipe has never been easier. There are millions on the Internet. But what these recipes on the Internet are, what they offer, whether they are any good and how you choose them stir frequent questions.
One way to examine this phenomenal explosion of Internet recipes is to take a look at three of the most popular sites and to compare what they offer to what a cookbook offers. The top three Google search results for "recipes" (excluding purely advertising vehicles) are www.allrecipes.com, www.foodnetwork.com and www.food.com. We can also include the popular site www.epicurious.com. Three of these four are very much family oriented and one less so. The predominant demographic, according to analysis by the website marketing company Alexa, is remarkably similar.
Allrecipes.com's main demographic are women 55 to 65 with some college education.
The Food Network site's main demographic are childless women with some college earning over $60,000 a year.
Food.com's main demographics are moderately educated women between 25 and 35, and women over 45 earning $30,000 a year.
Epicurious' are college educated childless women 45 to 55 years old.
Contrary to the leading demographic reports above, the sites clearly see their audience as the busy mom. The home pages for all three emphasize "easy," "quick," "fun," "kid-friendly" and "healthy" or "heart-healthy." Food.com, formerly called recipezaar.com, featured a story about the top 25 kid-friendly recipes. Among them was "octopus hot dog," a hot dog cut lengthwise in strips and splayed like an octopus, which has two ingredients, hot dog and ketchup. Also featured was a dish called hamburger noodle bake, with half of its calories coming from fat.
The Food Network site is much determined by the programming offered on its TV channel. A recent lead story was called "Family Fun Night." There, one could choose videos of a dish demonstrated or "last-minute dinners" or "quick and easy family meals." Another home-page choice is called "easy entertaining," where one can find restaurant chef-style dishes downsized for the home cook. Choices include pork souvlaki with honeyed apricots offered by chef Michael Symon, a CIA graduate, and Iron Chef America winner from Lola, his restaurant in Cleveland. In another video, Bobby Flay is explaining a gyro to two housewives (?). He pronounces it correctly (yee-ro) to the confusion of the guests, but has to move on (reluctantly?) given the constraints of the Food Network, or because no one cares from where a gyro comes.
Allrecipes.com, the most popular of the recipe sites, has tens of thousands of recipes and an equal amount of reviewers' comments. On the home page is a hyperlink collection of the most popular recipes, including in the top 10 the following: chili recipes, cookie recipes, kid-friendly recipes, meatloaf recipes, quick and easy recipes.
'Recipe of the Day'
One thing startlingly clear to anyone looking at recipes on these sites is that there is no prose, no story, no comment by the author and no context. What is offered are unadulterated recipes with an ingredient list and a numbered method. There is something else that all these sites don't do. They don't give you any way to search for a particular cuisine; it's all ingredient-driven. I will leave out Epicurious.com as its recipes are derived from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines and by professionals. The rest are all stocked with visitor-submitted recipes. All these sites offer a "Recipe of the Day," and that's what we can check for a critical look at what is offered.
Food.com offers Lindsey's Lemon Poppy Seed Cake by Brenda of Green Bay, Wis., who is married and has a teenage son. There is no introduction to Brenda's recipe, so we don't know who Lindsey is and what makes this cake special or why we would want to make it. A quick glance at the ingredients list is discouraging. The ingredient list is heavy on processed foods, such as boxes or cans of lemon cake mix, instant vanilla pudding, "lemon pie filling," instant lemon pudding and finally, the coup de grace, Cool Whip.
Allrecipes.com's recipe of the day is stuffed cabbage rolls by Judy. Almost 17,000 people have saved this recipe, and 365 have reviewed it on the site. Rice is cooked and mixed with ground beef, onion, egg, salt and pepper and stuffed in cabbage leaves. It is all braised in the contents of a can of condensed tomato soup. This is what Judy has to say about her recipe "I don't know where I got this recipe, but I have been using it for well over 20 years."
The Foodnetwork.com doesn't have a recipe of the day, but rather a "What's Cooking" featured recipe. The recipe offered was lemon chicken with artichoke hearts by Aida Mollenkamp, who has a grand diplome from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and is a former food editor of Chow.com with a TV show called "Ask Aida." Her recipe has the hallmarks of a professional. It has odd turns of phrase, but it sounds fine. Still, it has no introduction and nothing to indicate where the recipe is inspired from. Neither does it answer why and when one would want to make and eat it; and there's nothing about quality of ingredients.
Treating cooking like painting by numbers
It's clear that these food sites are meeting a demand. Many people just want to get a meal on the table, and they really don't care anything else about it except whether their spouses or children will eat it. Perhaps this is why the majority of visitor-submitted recipes are heavy on processed food and fats. Fat makes anything taste good. What the recipe sites don't do is teach one how to cook. They treat cooking like it's painting by numbers.
Cookbooks hold appeal for those who would like to cook better. A good cookbook (as opposed to a recipe collection) will teach you the broad brush strokes of a cuisine. A cookbook needs to be read and reread and will slow your hectic life down. Being a better cook means understanding why and what you're cooking. It will help grow your repertoire and give you the fundamentals to cook without recipes.
Here is the introduction to a recipe called "torta di patate, potato torta -- neither cake, nor flan, nor tart" from Patience Gray's "Honey from a Weed" (1986):
Don't start making this delicious torta until you have dried a stale white loaf in the oven to the point when it can be crushed to a powder by rolling a bottle over it on a hard surface. This is called pangrattato or pane grattugiato. In southern Italy there is a shortcut to preparing it, in the form of taralli, which are dry-baked biscuit rings (often flavored with fennel seeds). In the north, they use various forms of grissini, biscuit-like sticks that are instantly crushable.
She instructs in her recipe to peel and boil the potatoes and mash them immediately and then to put them in a pan and beat in some butter and hot milk. Eggs are whisked in with nutmeg, sugar, parmesan and lardo. This mixture goes into a pan covered with a dusting of the bread crumbs, is oiled, and baked.
In this simple recipe, whose charm beckons us to the kitchen to crush the grissini, to find out what lardo is, and how to make taralli, we glimpse the heart and soul of some of the best cooking in the world -- the cooking of southern Italy. We learn, we enjoy, we relish and, most important, we cook with feeling and love. We are proud of our potato torta when it comes out of the oven. It's not cooking by numbers, it's cooking. Not wishing to take anything away from someone who is perfectly happy with a recipe from allrecipes.com, there is, in a cookbook, a satisfaction, a happiness, a fulfillment, that offers a rich palate to the open-minded cook, budding or expert.
Clifford A. Wright won the James Beard / KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year award and the James Beard Award for the Best Writing on Food in 2000 for "A Mediterranean Feast."
Photo: An online recipe. Credit: Michelle van Vliet
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