My wife is a no-nonsense person.
One impractical part of modern life she rails against are recipe websites with flowery descriptions of food, accompanied by long, rambling love letters about how “everybody” the cook knows was wowed by the results.
“This is a venerable family tradition,” a typical entry might read, “and the results are a taste-tempting dish that looks as scrumptious as it tastes.”
Another site might opine about the challenges of making home-cooked meals in a time crunch and on a shoestring budget: “Here is a little something that can be whipped up between taking the dog to the vet and the kids to soccer practice. It’s possible most of these ingredients are in your cupboards already.”
I can tell from two rooms away when my wife is scrolling through these sites because she shouts, “Just tell me how to make it already!” (Expletives have been omitted out of deference to an all-ages audience.)
To erstwhile recipe writers, here are some tips from an intensely practical cook.
First, most souls who go online to look for recipes do so in a low-grade panic. The guests are coming tonight, the house needs cleaned and a menu prepared.
Protracted passages about how a recipe was smuggled by mule and body cavity along enemy lines in some banana republic might make for compelling television or a suspenseful novel. But they only get in the way of finding ingredients and determining if macaroni and cheese from scratch is viable or if swallowing one’s pride and buying a box mix is the way to go.
(For me, the path-of-least-resistance guy when it comes to manual labor — including slaving over a hot stove or oven — the box mix is always preferable, but I digress.)
Secondly, put the ingredients near the top of the page. Of course, a photo of the finished dish deserves star billing, but the ingredients should come immediately after. If you must share the biographies of Aunt Ida and Uncle Sid, who toiled over the exact ratio of salt to dough for almost 18 years in their SoHo flat before birthing a pretzel bundt cake that enthralled heads of state in several European nations, do it at the bottom of the page.
On the topic of ingredients, if anything needs to be set back for later, make a note of this at the top. Few things in the cooking realm are more maddening than learning you’ve added one too many cups of flour at an early stage and created a viscous mass more likely to terrorize Steve McQueen in a 1950s sci-fi movie than serve as your family’s dessert.
This next recommendation might strike some as cynical, but recipe writers should think like inexperienced people who seldom do more than boil water or cut slits in film before putting TV dinners in the microwave. If they were more skilled, they wouldn’t be trolling the dark web for something as simple as a recipe for barbecued chicken.
At least in my experience, if it can go wrong in the kitchen, it will. A few weeks ago, I tried to make brownie waffles. The video accompanying the recipe was deceptively simple: Mix togetheringredients from a box of Betty Crocker brownies, heat the waffle iron, pour and wait.
The results in the video looked wonderful. The brownies slid out of the waffle iron more smoothly than lies from a politician’s lips.
My waffles, not so much.
Maybe I overfilled the waffle iron or didn’t use enough cooking spray. Whatever the reason, the mix sloshed over the top when I closed the lid, oozing into the guts of the device and down the sides before flowing across the cupboard like frothing flood water. When I tried to remove the waffles, everything stuck to everything else.
The cleanup was as much fun as you might imagine. I can still smell brownies whenever I make a traditional waffle, an olfactory ghost in the machine.
Surely the recipe writer could have anticipated such a mess and added a warning, maybe in place of the gushing summary about how the cook’s family gave a standing ovation, the queen knighted the recipe’s creator and the pope canonized her.
In the meantime, my wife and I would be thankful to anybody who can point us toward a site with just the Cliff’s Notes and none of the autobiographical fluff.
Less “author, author!” and more “entree! entree!” please.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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