And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one.

I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.

The website is searchable and has videos. :-D

Cooks Illustrated is amazing, the rigor they go through testing everything, and adapting to available ingredients, makes for such incredible reliability!

I have never understood what the filler content on recipe pages is accomplishing though. It somehow makes the page do better in google? How?

Plain and simple, Google won't rank you without it. Google looks for additional filler when ranking. Otherwise you would see different kinds of sites.

Then we have to blame Google, not the authors.

Right, but is there any explanation for why a recipe page with several pages of filler content ranks better on Google though?

I assume (?) it is not google engineers tuning for this particular outcome on purpose...

Not all that plain and simple.

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