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Allrecipes, America's Most Unruly Cooking Web Site ==================================================

by Ruby Tandoh

A few months ago, I found myself in possession of a bag of apples and
craving an apple pie, of the archetypal cooling-on-the-window-ledge
variety. I pictured a double-crust flaky pastry around apple and
cinnamon--not too complicated to make on a week night, but robust
enough that I'd be able to slice a clean, thick wedge. Despite
knowing how to make apple pie, I wanted the peace of mind that can
come only from following a trusted recipe. I have more cookbooks than
my bookshelves can support, including at least a dozen that could've
proffered something reliable and extensively fussed over. I ignored
them and Googled "apple pie recipe."

The search engine quickly returned some options. First was "Homemade
apple pie," from Good Food, a British site. (The algorithm tends to
meet us where we are, which in my case is London.) Next, from the
more boutique recipe sites, a run of superlatives--"Best Apple Pie
Recipe We've Ever Made," "My Perfect Apple Pie," "Apple Pie Recipe
with the Best Filling," "My Favorite Apple Pie"--laden with
byzantine, keyword-riddled preambles. I stopped at the eighth result:
"Apple Pie by Grandma Ople," from Allrecipes.com. It showed up next
to a thumbnail photo that I probably could've taken on my phone. The
preview text cut straight to the ingredients list, whereas other
recipes had started with more of a hard sell. ("The pie crust is
perfection and the filling will surprise and delight you.") Grandma
Ople's version seemed low-key, amenable to the ordinary constraints
of my kitchen and my patience. It had more than twelve thousand
ratings, Google told me, with an average of 4.8 out of five stars. I
clicked on through.

If you have searched online for any classic American recipe at any
point in the past twenty-five years, you will almost certainly have
encountered Allrecipes. Feed the Google search bar "best chocolate
chip cookies" and an Allrecipes version, submitted by a user going by
Dora and with more than fourteen thousand five hundred almost
unanimously glowing reviews, will probably come up on the first page
of results. The site lacks the gravitas of Bon Appétit or the Times
cooking section; instead, it falls in the category of sites you never
really intend to end up on. Like the Internet itself, Allrecipes
suffers for its ubiquity. You might not recall that you've used it,
even if you've cooked Grandma Ople's apple pie every fall for the
past decade.

The recipes on Allrecipes are nearly all user-submitted. This gives
it an aura of shambolic good will, a cross between a church cookbook
and a fan-run Wiki. The site has a 4.5-star mac-and-cheese recipe
posted under the username g0dluvsugly. One of the most popular
recipes on the platform is John Chandler's 2001 upload "World's Best
Lasagna" which could be called the most popular lasagna in the world:
more than twenty thousand ratings, nearly fifteen thousand
evangelical reviews, and more than seven million views per year. In
2013, Chandler was invited to talk about it on "Good Morning
America"; when he died, in 2022, he was eulogized on Allrecipes.

The site's anarchic tendency can be charming. It also evokes the
cautionary "too many cooks." Take the messy roster of carrot cakes:
one anonymously authored carrot cake is a traditional version; Best
Carrot Cake Ever, by Nan, involves precooking the carrots; Carrot
Cake XII, made with canned, puréed carrots, is unfortunately a dud.
Because the site relies mostly on targeted searches, the recipes that
do well tend to be the ones that people already know they want: meat
loaf, Cinnabon dupes, seven-layer dips. Often, the best-performing
recipes have a smart but subtle hack. In the case of my apple pie, it
was simmering butter with sugar first, then pouring the mixture over
the lattice crust before baking, letting it glaze the crust and
trickle down onto the fruit. This isn't the traditional way, but it
results in a richer pie, with a crispy, caramelized crust.

Since it started, Allrecipes has become a repository for more than a
hundred and thirteen thousand crowdsourced recipes. Irma S.
Rombauer's "Joy of Cooking," perhaps the most influential American
cookbook of all time, has more than twenty million copies in
circulation, since it was first self-published a century ago;
Allrecipes.com reaches somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million
home cooks each month. You won't see intricate methods or nerdy
adventures in technique here--just recipes, backstories,
transparently bad ideas, homespun strokes of genius, delicately
Midwestern one-upmanship, and, collectively, one of the greatest
archives of American food culture the country has produced.

What is now Allrecipes began with a crew of archeology students at
the University of Washington. Tim Hunt, Mark Madsen, Carl Lipo,
Michael Pfeffer, and David Quinn, along with Dan Shepherd, a
Web-designer friend of theirs, ran a scrappy Web company called
Emergent Media, making sites for a range of customers (the Illinois
Department for Natural Resources, Microsoft) using a shared Internet
line and a few servers in an office cupboard. Domain names were
abundant at the time, and the group wanted to start a site of their
own. They tried out a few concepts: ultimatefrisbee.com,
roadsidereviews.com (a kind of proto-Yelp), beerinstitute.com. Porn
came up as one possibility, although when it went to a secret ballot
the vote returned unanimous nos. They took a chance instead on
something else they could bank on bored, Internet-surfing Americans
seeking out, and registered the domain Cookierecipe.com.

The site, created by Hunt and co-created by Sheperd, with the others
as business partners, went live on July 28, 1997. The guys seeded the
site with a few cookie recipes from family and friends, but the idea
was that the contributions would ultimately be crowdsourced, with
visitors uploading their own. They'd wondered whether people would
bother typing out their recipes for no money or measurable reward,
but they found themselves quickly inundated. Cooks sent in their
recipes, e-mailed their entries to friends, bookmarked them, and
printed them out in what amounted to an accidental guerrilla
marketing campaign. There were Beatrice Savitz's Apricot Cookies,
posted by her granddaughter; lemon bars submitted by Ingrid, from a
German lady she met in Indiana more than twenty years prior; a chocolate-chip-cookie recipe attributed to Hillary Clinton. "There's
always somebody in a friend group who goes, 'I hate their cookie
recipe--my cookie recipe is better,'" David Quinn, one of the
co-owners, said, recalling the site's early days. And besides, he
added, "Every American wants to be famous, right?"

Hunt, who was understood to be the Emergent team's database genius,
realized that if a digital recipe archive was going to be successful
it'd have to offer more than just straight instructions. Tech has
been trying, and mostly failing, to improve on traditional cookbooks
for a long time. The Honeywell kitchen computer, which débuted in the
late sixties, was a paper-tape-reading meal-planning system that
required the homemaker to code. By the eighties, home computers were
being advertised as recipe-storing devices, but people seemed to
spend more time on them making spreadsheets or playing games. The
nineties saw the emergence of CD-ROM recipe books like the MasterCook
series. All things considered, it was probably easier to use a book.

With the growth of the Internet, people could finally start to
exchange recipes rather than just hoard them. Usenet, an all-purpose mega-forum, had recipe-sharing message boards, but they were clunky
and difficult to search. For a more comprehensive resource, you could
go to Epicurious (tagline: "The taste of the web"), which scraped
recipes from across the Condé Nast stable of magazines. There was
also the more grassroots SOAR--the Searchable Online Archive of
Recipes--built by a student at U.C. Berkeley. It was thorough,
esoteric, and incredibly hard to follow.

Cookierecipe.com had to be different. Hunt built in features that
allowed users to search not just by ingredient but by multiple
ingredients, and by ingredients they wanted to avoid. Users could
convert from imperial to metric measures. Before Cookierecipe.com,
most recipes online were just facsimiles of those offline--blocks of
static text. But, over the first few years of the site, Hunt created
a recipe matrix, where if you entered, say, your grandmother's
chocolate-chip cookies it would be broken into discrete units of
data. Instead of "a cup of flour," the database would place "one cup"
in one column and "flour" in another. This made it possible for users
to scale a recipe up or down in a single click. Before the advent of
Google, Hunt and his team anticipated perhaps the biggest
transformation in cookery of the past century: that once you had
access to all the recipes in the world you'd need help finding what
you were actually looking for.

Cookierecipe started with a couple dozen recipes; by January, 1998,
it had nearly eight hundred. The team expanded their territory to
encompass Chickenrecipe.com, Cakerecipe.com, Pierecipe.com, Thanksgivingrecipe.com, and more. In 1999, at around the time these
sites hit a million users combined, the group consolidated all the
sites under the übergeneralist banner that they still use today: Allrecipes.com.

I came across Banana Cake VI (Allrecipes has many) while looking for
a dressed-up alternative to my usual dowdy, loaf-tin banana breads.
The recipe was uploaded to Cakerecipe.com in 1999 by Cindy Carnes, a
licensed nurse living in Melbourne, Iowa. It was a large,
tray-bake-style banana cake with cream-cheese frosting and a
preternaturally moist crumb--a recipe given to Carnes by a friend she
had gone to visit. Buttermilk and lemon juice add gentle acidity,
sharpening the banana flavor and keeping the fruit from browning so
much; baking soda--rather than baking powder--gives instant lift. The
real trick, though, is the technique. You cook the cake in a low
oven, lower than most people would trust is going to work, and then
put it in the freezer for forty-five minutes, right after you've
pulled it out of the oven, to arrest the cooking process. It's a
smart idea, especially for a large cake, for which it's easy to
overbake the edges before the center is set. Carnes told me, of the
friend who gave her the recipe, "her son worked in a bakery in St.
Louis, and he said, 'That's what we do with all of our cakes.' I told
her, 'We need to share this with the world.'"

Today, Carnes is sixty-seven years old and lives in Glenwood, Iowa.
Her mother ran a small restaurant called Val's Cafe. Carnes helped
with making pies there, and still considers herself a baker. About
twenty-five years ago, she was given some particularly great
peanut-butter fudge, and when she asked for the recipe she was told
it was online--somewhere called Allrecipes. "Back then, I wasn't on
the Internet much," she said. She tracked down the recipe and found
Creamy Peanut Butter Fudge, uploaded by a user named Janet Awaldt.
That fudge, and Allrecipes, has been part of Carnes's cooking ever
since.

Carnes is pretty typical for an Allrecipes user. Most visitors to the
site are women, with an average age in the fifties. She tends toward
simple recipes. Carnes lives a forty-minute drive from the nearest
decent grocery store, and she benefits from the skew toward recipes
that don't involve too many from-scratch ingredients or, indeed, too
many ingredients at all. When I asked Arie Knutson, Allrecipes'
senior editorial director of features, whether any city or area is a
particular stronghold, she stressed that the site is borderless, but
anyone who has spent even five minutes on it will notice that it has
a Midwestern lilt--to start, there are at least a hundred and eighty
Jell-O salads. In a food-media world largely defined by the coasts,
it is one of the most important sites cataloguing the culinary
proclivities of the country's middle tranche.

Like lots of Allrecipes users, Carnes has little time for the
preciousness that establishment food media can sometimes promote.
Take Martha Stewart: "She's telling us about the Madagascan vanilla
beans." Carnes's voice, an Iowa singsong, can wend from weary to
impassioned in the course of a single thought. "Well, honey,
Martha--I'm going to break this to you gently. I'm not going to pay
eight hundred dollars to make my own vanilla. I can get it for seven
dollars at the grocery store." She looks, instead, for simplicity.
Her Allrecipes uploads tend toward low-prep classics: a
family-favorite olive cheese ball, a simple yet kaleidoscopic taco
dip, and no-bake peanut-butter cookies. "I don't want to make my own
sauce," she told me. That night's dinner was cabbage rolls, an
Allrecipes number from a user going by Judy. In this preparation, the ground-beef filling is wrapped in a delicate cabbage-leaf caul, and
then braised in canned tomato soup.

In 2009, Christopher Kimball, the co-founder of America's Test
Kitchen, wrote a eulogy for the late Gourmet magazine, the onetime
home of such revered food writers as Ruth Reichl, James Beard, Laurie
Colwin, M. F. K. Fisher, and Jonathan Gold. Kimball mourned it, and
saw the loss as part of a bigger problem in American gastronomic
life. It's a common complaint that, in the age of the Internet,
everyone's a critic; the other side of this is that everyone's a
chef. "Google 'broccoli casserole' and make the first recipe you
find. I guarantee it will be disappointing," Kimball wrote. He didn't
mention Allrecipes by name, although he didn't really need to. The
site has always championed the expertise of ordinary home cooks. An
early staff T-shirt depicted a wooden spoon in an upraised fist, with
a slogan about "breaking the hegemony of tyrant chefs."

Allrecipes exists in a long line of collectively authored recipe
projects, which reflect vernacular cooking in granular and
occasionally unflattering detail. Community cookbooks circulated by
rotary associations, Girl Scout troops, synagogues, churches,
sororities, and military wives' circles are perhaps the most prolific expression of American culinary thought; from the eighteen-fifties
until the end of the century, recipes in the Times were mainly
crowdsourced, and collected in a drab if effective home-economics
section called "The Household." Amanda Hesser, the founder of Food52,
curated an extensive selection of the recipes for the 2010 edition of
"The Essential New York Times Cookbook." Among them were broiled
steak with oysters and Boston cream doughnut. She told me, "It was a
very candid look at: what were people thinking about? What were they
needing to know?"

In a 2002 article for the Times, under the headline "America's Real
Foodie Bible," Regina Schrambling reported on the cultural heft of
Taste of Home magazine--a publication that almost exclusively
features reader-submitted recipes, and which, in 2002, many cooks
outside the Midwest had never heard of. It was, at that point, the
most popular cooking magazine in the country, its circulation of
nearly five million more than that of Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and
Gourmet combined. Carnes vaguely remembers one of her recipes being
printed there. It's the only food magazine that she ever subscribed
to, until it got too expensive. By that point, she'd set up an
Allrecipes account instead.

By 2001, Allrecipes was the most popular recipe site on the Internet.
A couple of years before, the co-owners had brought on a new C.E.O.,
Bill Moore, who had conceived and launched the Starbucks Frapuccino
and, as it happens, oversaw the MasterCook CD-ROMs. As food
businesses took note of the site's some 3.5 million users, ad revenue increased, and brands like Hershey's and Quaker Oats began posting
advertorial recipes on the site. Before long, Allrecipes was being
courted for a buyout by precisely the establishment media that it had
tried to disrupt.

Although the site continued to grow, it never quite resolved a
dilemma that had beset it from the start: does an autarky of
passionate home cooks need an editor? When you give people the
freedom to upload the recipes they love, you can bank on many of them
being average and at least some of them being bad. Even a great cook
may be inept at recipe writing, a complex exercise that involves
carefully recording your work and anticipating any of the million
places where an amateur might slip up.

Early on, the co-owners developed a system for moderating the recipes
as they were sent in--checking whether they were plagiarized;
scanning for any glaring errors, like tablespoons of baking soda
where it should have been teaspoons; adjudicating whether a
submission was a recipe at all. ("Somebody tried to tell us to heat
up a burrito and add a bottle of taco sauce to it, and nacho sauce,
and add cheese and put it in the oven. This is not a recipe," Quinn
recalled. "But I immediately went home and I was, like, 'This is
awesome.'") So long as the recipe made sense, it was good enough to
allow onto the site--and that's how something like Carrot Cake XII,
the dud with the canned carrots, passed muster.

But it quickly became obvious that the best approach was to let the
cooks be the judge: it's the reviews, even more than the recipes,
that make the site. Look at its all-time top recipes today--Good
Old-Fashioned Pancakes, Easy Meatloaf, Taco Seasoning, To Die For
Blueberry Muffins--all vetted by tens of thousands of home cooks, and
all uploaded in Allrecipes' golden age, between 1998 and 2002, when
there were comparatively few other resources for finding recipes
online. It's hard to imagine John Chandler's "World's Best Lasagna"
doing quite so well if it were uploaded now, to a busier and more
cynical Internet.

In 2006, Allrecipes sold to Reader's Digest, and within a couple of
years all the original co-owners had left. Six years later,
Allrecipes sold to Meredith (now Dotdash Meredith), the media group
that owns Food & Wine, The Spruce Eats, Serious Eats, and EatingWell.
In the years since, the site has taken on the mannerisms of
establishment food media, in which editorial content is pushed to the
fore. Go on Allrecipes today and you will see a selection of
highlighted user recipes, but also more carefully vetted pieces such
as "Chef John's Best Recipes for When Summer Tomatoes Are at Their
Peak" and "8 Essential Tips for Summer Hosting (and Actually Enjoying Yourself)."

The old, more chaotic Allrecipes survives in the archives, but is
increasingly hard to find. Of the hundred and thirteen thousand
recipes on the site, some fifty-five thousand are actually accessible
by search. Many older recipes have been suppressed, and new ones now
undergo a more rigorous vetting process. "The submissions go into a
queue that our editorial team reviews for publication," Molly Fergus,
the site's senior vice-president and associate group general manager,
told me via e-mail. "Recipes are only searchable on site (or on
Google) once they are accepted and edited by our recipe team." In
some ways, it's a more reliable site now--curation means that the test-kitchen-approved recipes tend to rise to the top of the search
page, and those with bad reviews can be found and reëvaluated by the
editorial teams. Yet it feels less like a place for home cooks to
gather and experiment than it used to. And certain tools that Hunt
put in place in the early days--searching by multiple ingredients,
scaling recipes up or down--are gone. Carnes told me that she's had
recipes languish in the backlog for years. In striving to
professionalize itself, the site has lost the often troublesome
entropy that once made it so fun.

Tim Hunt left Allrecipes shortly after the sale to Reader's Digest,
and hasn't used it as much since then, except for cookie recipes. He
hardly cooked when he first engineered the site, but he's now a
proper culinary nerd, smoking chiles and making his own cider vinegar
from the fruits of an Asian-pear tree in his garden. On the phone, he
enthused about the chef Derek Sarno--"a vegan, but not a fascist
vegan"--and told me about a Sarno-inspired sandwich he'd recently
made for dinner, with blocks of fried, spiced tofu and really good
barbecue sauce. Hunt also grows buckwheat, a favorite ingredient of
mine, and after we hung up we exchanged recipes: he sent a link for
buckwheat crinkle cookies that he and his wife make each Christmas; I
sent a recipe for buckwheat shortbread in return.

At its best, this is how Allrecipes worked--as a kind of culinary
hive mind, a place that understood that the only thing people like
more than making recipes is comparing them. (My buckwheat shortbread
was caught up in the purgatorial Allrecipes queue for a few months,
but is now finally online.) One of Cindy Carnes's most treasured
contributions is called Mary's Meatballs, named for a nurse Carnes
worked with in the nineties. You take a jar of chili sauce, a cup of
brown sugar, a sixteen-ounce can of whole cranberries, and a can of
sauerkraut, put it all in a pan, and heat over a gentle flame. Once
it's simmering, you pour it over three pounds of meatballs, and bake
for an hour in an oven at three hundred and fifty degrees. "She
brought those all the time to everything, every potluck and
everything at the hospital," Carnes told me. People seemed to love
them. Mary handed over the recipe after she was diagnosed as having
terminal breast cancer. "She said, 'Please make my meatballs. And
remember me.'" She died in 1995.

Right now, Carnes is in the middle of putting together a family
cookbook, using an old collection of her aunt's as a scaffold for her
own additions--clipped from copies of Taste of Home, printed out from Allrecipes, or kept on a scrap of paper, then painstakingly typed up.
So far, she's collected more than a thousand entries; Mary's
Meatballs is among them. Now she's got to find a way to actually
print and share the volume with her family. If only there were a
place for all this--a forum big and lawless enough to host several
generations' worth of eclectic culinary lore. "Well," she said with a
sigh. "That's the bugaboo."

From: <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/ allrecipes-americas-most-unruly-cooking-web-site>
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