Why I hate cooking blogs
Epictetus once said: "An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.” Clearly he never needed to follow a recipe from Good Food, otherwise he would shout at the screen and throw himself off the Parthenon steps in olive-fuelled frustration.
I’m not a good cook. Most people blame themselves if their chocolate brownies come out darker than a gastronomical black hole. A better man would blame himself for his cooking prowess. But no, not me. Recipe writers are actively trying to make the recipe unreadable. Whoever writes recipes for an online audience makes it exceedingly difficult to get the job done in a simple and clear way, forcing the reader to take a Jacob’s Ladder worth of steps to make a simple brownie.
First, you need to find a recipe. Good luck with that. With the proliferation of AI, Google searches for good recipes have been enshittified into a gruel of similar pages, tips and tricks on the first page. I know it is hard to differentiate with recipes – there are only so many ways you can bake a pie. But both humans and AI now read each other’s work, copying steps and presenting a tasteless gruel of a recipe that is a monstrous conglomeration of many, many others.
Then these authors try to game Google’s ranking system by trying to rank on the first page. Some time ago, that meant making articles as long as possible so that Google indexes the page properly. And that means adding long and winding stories about how the recipe either repaired your marriage, got you laid, or powered your regular workout. None of the stories may be true; the recipe writer doesn’t especially care if a tikka masala helps you reach the third stage of Nirvana. All that matters is that the story is sufficiently long enough with relevant words (warm, spicy, Indian) to help it reach the first page.
Finally, the serving amounts. Why do writers use the most nebulous measurement systems possible? What is a knob of butter? Most men will tell you that knobs come in different sizes. What about a chunk of potato? My version of a chunk could border on a chonk, depending on my mood. One writer uses the phrase QB – or quanto basta – which means “when enough.” Makes sense, but my sense of “enough” borders on insanity for some people who cook with me.
“Then why not buy a cookbook?” some retort. “All of this is solved if you support the chef.” If I discovered an oil field in my backyard, I could consider moving my finances to buy cookbooks. But even then, most books sit on my shelf collecting dust, a weighty tome of unused recipes that tantalize but rarely draw me in. How many of you received a cookbook by Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith or Stanley Tucci, and used it once or twice? And even when it was used once, it was to make a variation of what you can already cook, like a sunday roast?
I know I previously wrote about how I hate short-form videos, but some of the best recipes came from Instagram Reels. Creatives give the full recipe, flash full instructions on the screen, and show how to make a good meal in exact amounts. I’m sure cooking content on Reels will become enshittified with time. But not yet.
