I'm pretty good at telling the future. I'm going to say that ... you will have to pay.

People go to recipe sites for the content, they read it, and then they leave. They don't click on adverts or engage in any monetizable way. People build recipe sites because getting a database of recipes is easy and they're trivial to build so you can throw a site with lots of pages (and lots of ads) up on the web fast. That doesn't mean they generate any revenue.