That's why search engines rated them highly, and why a million spam sites cropped up that paid writers $1/essay to pretend to be Aunt May, and why today every recipe website has a gigantic useless fake essay in front of their copypasted made up recipes.

I hate how looking for recipes has become so… disheartening. Online recipes are fine for reputable sources like newspapers where professional recipe writers are paid for their contributions, but searching for some Aunt May's recipe for 'X' in the big ocean of the internet is pointless — too much raw sewage dumped in.

It sucks, because sharing recipes seemed like one of those things the internet could be really good at.

There seem to be quite a few recipe sharing sites around - e.g. allrecipes.com.

And they're all flooded with low effort trash and useless.

The only remaining reliable source - now that many newspapers are axing the remaining staff in favour of LLMs - is pre-2020 print cookbooks. Anything online or printed later must be assumed to be tainted, full of untested sewage and potentially dangerous suggestions.

The wife and I use the internet for recipe ideas... but we hardly ever follow them directly anymore. We're no formally-trained chefs but we've been home cooks for over 20 years now, and so many of them are self-evidently bad, or distinctly suboptimal. The internet chef's aversion to flavor is a meme with us now; "add one-sixty-fourth of a teaspoon of garlic powder to your gallon of soup, and mix in two crystals of table salt". Either that or they're all getting some seriously potent spices all the time and I'd like to know where they shop because my spices are nowhere near as powerful as theirs.

It's not just online recipes, but cookbooks written for the Better Home & Gardens crowd. The ones who write "curry powder" (and mean the yellow McCormick stuff which is so bland as to have almost no flavour) or call for one clove of garlic in their recipe.

I joke with folks that my assumption with "one clove of garlic" is that they really mean "one head of garlic" if you want any flavour. (And if the recipe title has "garlic" in it and you are using one clove, you’re lying.)

If the recipe has "garlic" in the title, I'm budgeting 1/2 head per serving.

Well there's https://www.allrecipes.com/author/chef-john/ on that particular site.

I absolutely love Chef John. Great recipes and the cadence of his speech on YouTube (foodwishes) is very soothing, while he cooks up something amazing. If you're a home cook I highly recommend his recipes and his channel.

Chef John is the best.

It's interesting to search for recipes in other languages and not find junk as we do in English.

I read Spanish and Italian fluently and stumble my way through Japanese (with translation). It's easier to find a good recipe in these languages, provided you can find the ingredients or substitutes.

Ok, but what i said is true regardless of SEO, and that SEO has also fed back into english before LLMs were a thing. If you only train on those subsets you'll also end up with a chatbot that doesn't speak in a way we'll identify as natural english.

Yet. Give it time. The LLMs will train our future children.

I'm sure they already are.

I wish more people presented recipes like cooking for engineers. For example - Meat Lasagna https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/36/Meat-Lasagna

And here I thought my defacement of printed recipes by bracketing everything that goes together at each stage was just me. There are, well, maybe not dozens but at least two of us! Saves a lot of bowls when you know without further checking that you can, say, just dump the flour and sugar, butter and eggs into the big bowl without having to prepare separately because they're in the "1: big bowl" bracket.

Depends on what you’re doing. For best cookies, you want to cream the butter with the sugar, then add the eggs, and finally add the flour. If you’re interested and can find one, it’s worth taking a vegan baking class. You learn a lot about ingredient substitutions for baking, about what the different non-vegan ingredients are doing that you have to compensate for…and it does something that I’ve only recently started seeing happen in non-vegan baking recipes: it separates the wet ingredients from the dry ingredients.

That is, when baking, you can usually (again, exceptions for creaming the sugar in butter, etc.) take all of your dry ingredients and mix/sift them together, and then you pour your wet ingredients in a well you’ve made in the dry ingredients (these can also usually be mixed together).

No need to cakesplain, that was an example with three ingredients of the top of my head, very, very obviously the exact ingredients and bracket assignments vary depending on what you are making.

But for shortbread or fork biscuits those three could indeed all go in the bowl in one go (but that one admittedly doesn't really need a bracket because the recipe is "put in bowl, mix with hands, bake").

I love the table-diagrams at the end. I've never seen anything like that until now and it really seems useful for visualization of the recipe and the sequence of steps.

Combined with pictures for what each step should look like. I had a few of these pages printed out back in the '00s for some recipes that I did.

Interestingly my wife has been writing recipes on post-it notes for years in that same style, with arrows instead of tables. And she's the opposite to an Engineer, a psychologist (interest in people vs objects).

When I saw them, they blew my mind. Short to store and easy to understand.