Recipe Novels Need to Die

Several years ago, I wrote about a very first world problem that has, sadly, only grown far, far worse.

Let’s see if any of this sounds familiar. It’s late afternoon and after a long day of spinning plates, juggling chainsaws and running your own personal mini-circus, you realize that you’d better figure out something to eat before you start gnawing on your own hands, faint with hunger.

Let’s say you want to make lentil soup, so you type “Lentil soup” into the search bar and up pops several beautiful soup pictures accompanied by hundreds of five star reviews. You click on the best looking one and here it comes.

First, there’s a catchy title like: “The Very Best Super Easy Amazingly Delicious Lentil Soup”. Great, that’s fine. That’s followed by a paragraph about how delicious and amazing and easy this soup is. One would assume the recipe would follow.

No. You’d think, but no.

The introductory paragraph is followed by a lengthy and personal story on the origins of said recipe or perhaps how the author feels about this particular lentil recipe. This is followed by more paragraphs on what exactly a lentil IS, where they are grown, when they were domesticated, lentil varieties, the full nutritional profile of a lentil, how lentils can be prepared, where to buy lentils, variations on the ingredients, variations on how to cook the soup, what an Instant Pot is, the best pot to prepare the soup in….you get the idea. Then you get a fully photographed series on each and every step of making the soup, and then…only THEN do you reach the actual recipe. Thank God for the “Jump to Recipe” button. Whoever invented that should be sainted.

This reminds me of the Alamo scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure where Pee-Wee finally makes it to the Alamo to look for his beloved stolen bicycle. He was told that his bike is in the basement of the Alamo, so he buys a ticket for the tour. The effervescent and irrepressible tour guide, Tina, (played by Jan Hooks) goes into a description of the Alamo as a visibly impatient Pee-Wee attempts to contain his anxiety as they view different rooms. But the gem…the ABSOLUTE GEM of a line is when they make it to the kitchen where Tina begins to talk about corn. The line is “There are thousands and THOUSANDS of uses for corn, all of which I will tell you about right now!”

And here is where Pee-Wee Herman and I merge into one being. The absolute annoyance, irritation, and dare I say disgust at having to wait for what we came for is very real. Pee-Wee just wanted to see the freaking basement. He didn’t want to hear twenty thousand ways to prepare corn. I just want to see a recipe before I give up and decide to eat a stale bag of Cheerios that have somehow been around, opened, since Halloween. (It’s March.)

I honestly thought this trend would slowly fade away but it’s only gotten much worse, especially with the rise of AI use in blogging. Am I the only one who can sniff out an AI written/assisted blog? It’s like that robotic woman’s voice that was so popular on memes a few years back. It’s human-esque, but creepy and…insincere.

I want to start a trend. Let’s get back to online recipe simplicity. Post a nice picture or two, a few sentences, and get that recipe back to the top, where it belongs!

I hereby declare war on the recipe novels!

End note: Many, many thanks to the awesome soul who created the above image!