From: bencollver@tilde.pink   
      
   Allrecipes, America's Most Unruly Cooking Web Site   
   ==================================================   
      
   by Ruby Tandoh   
      
   A few months ago, I found myself in possession of a bag of apples and   
   craving an apple pie, of the archetypal cooling-on-the-window-ledge   
   variety. I pictured a double-crust flaky pastry around apple and   
   cinnamon--not too complicated to make on a week night, but robust   
   enough that I'd be able to slice a clean, thick wedge. Despite   
   knowing how to make apple pie, I wanted the peace of mind that can   
   come only from following a trusted recipe. I have more cookbooks than   
   my bookshelves can support, including at least a dozen that could've   
   proffered something reliable and extensively fussed over. I ignored   
   them and Googled "apple pie recipe."   
      
   The search engine quickly returned some options. First was "Homemade   
   apple pie," from Good Food, a British site. (The algorithm tends to   
   meet us where we are, which in my case is London.) Next, from the   
   more boutique recipe sites, a run of superlatives--"Best Apple Pie   
   Recipe We've Ever Made," "My Perfect Apple Pie," "Apple Pie Recipe   
   with the Best Filling," "My Favorite Apple Pie"--laden with   
   byzantine, keyword-riddled preambles. I stopped at the eighth result:   
   "Apple Pie by Grandma Ople," from Allrecipes.com. It showed up next   
   to a thumbnail photo that I probably could've taken on my phone. The   
   preview text cut straight to the ingredients list, whereas other   
   recipes had started with more of a hard sell. ("The pie crust is   
   perfection and the filling will surprise and delight you.") Grandma   
   Ople's version seemed low-key, amenable to the ordinary constraints   
   of my kitchen and my patience. It had more than twelve thousand   
   ratings, Google told me, with an average of 4.8 out of five stars. I   
   clicked on through.   
      
   If you have searched online for any classic American recipe at any   
   point in the past twenty-five years, you will almost certainly have   
   encountered Allrecipes. Feed the Google search bar "best chocolate   
   chip cookies" and an Allrecipes version, submitted by a user going by   
   Dora and with more than fourteen thousand five hundred almost   
   unanimously glowing reviews, will probably come up on the first page   
   of results. The site lacks the gravitas of Bon Appétit or the Times   
   cooking section; instead, it falls in the category of sites you never   
   really intend to end up on. Like the Internet itself, Allrecipes   
   suffers for its ubiquity. You might not recall that you've used it,   
   even if you've cooked Grandma Ople's apple pie every fall for the   
   past decade.   
      
   The recipes on Allrecipes are nearly all user-submitted. This gives   
   it an aura of shambolic good will, a cross between a church cookbook   
   and a fan-run Wiki. The site has a 4.5-star mac-and-cheese recipe   
   posted under the username g0dluvsugly. One of the most popular   
   recipes on the platform is John Chandler's 2001 upload "World's Best   
   Lasagna" which could be called the most popular lasagna in the world:   
   more than twenty thousand ratings, nearly fifteen thousand   
   evangelical reviews, and more than seven million views per year. In   
   2013, Chandler was invited to talk about it on "Good Morning   
   America"; when he died, in 2022, he was eulogized on Allrecipes.   
      
   The site's anarchic tendency can be charming. It also evokes the   
   cautionary "too many cooks." Take the messy roster of carrot cakes:   
   one anonymously authored carrot cake is a traditional version; Best   
   Carrot Cake Ever, by Nan, involves precooking the carrots; Carrot   
   Cake XII, made with canned, puréed carrots, is unfortunately a dud.   
   Because the site relies mostly on targeted searches, the recipes that   
   do well tend to be the ones that people already know they want: meat   
   loaf, Cinnabon dupes, seven-layer dips. Often, the best-performing   
   recipes have a smart but subtle hack. In the case of my apple pie, it   
   was simmering butter with sugar first, then pouring the mixture over   
   the lattice crust before baking, letting it glaze the crust and   
   trickle down onto the fruit. This isn't the traditional way, but it   
   results in a richer pie, with a crispy, caramelized crust.   
      
   Since it started, Allrecipes has become a repository for more than a   
   hundred and thirteen thousand crowdsourced recipes. Irma S.   
   Rombauer's "Joy of Cooking," perhaps the most influential American   
   cookbook of all time, has more than twenty million copies in   
   circulation, since it was first self-published a century ago;   
   Allrecipes.com reaches somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million   
   home cooks each month. You won't see intricate methods or nerdy   
   adventures in technique here--just recipes, backstories,   
   transparently bad ideas, homespun strokes of genius, delicately   
   Midwestern one-upmanship, and, collectively, one of the greatest   
   archives of American food culture the country has produced.   
      
   What is now Allrecipes began with a crew of archeology students at   
   the University of Washington. Tim Hunt, Mark Madsen, Carl Lipo,   
   Michael Pfeffer, and David Quinn, along with Dan Shepherd, a   
   Web-designer friend of theirs, ran a scrappy Web company called   
   Emergent Media, making sites for a range of customers (the Illinois   
   Department for Natural Resources, Microsoft) using a shared Internet   
   line and a few servers in an office cupboard. Domain names were   
   abundant at the time, and the group wanted to start a site of their   
   own. They tried out a few concepts: ultimatefrisbee.com,   
   roadsidereviews.com (a kind of proto-Yelp), beerinstitute.com. Porn   
   came up as one possibility, although when it went to a secret ballot   
   the vote returned unanimous nos. They took a chance instead on   
   something else they could bank on bored, Internet-surfing Americans   
   seeking out, and registered the domain Cookierecipe.com.   
      
   The site, created by Hunt and co-created by Sheperd, with the others   
   as business partners, went live on July 28, 1997. The guys seeded the   
   site with a few cookie recipes from family and friends, but the idea   
   was that the contributions would ultimately be crowdsourced, with   
   visitors uploading their own. They'd wondered whether people would   
   bother typing out their recipes for no money or measurable reward,   
   but they found themselves quickly inundated. Cooks sent in their   
   recipes, e-mailed their entries to friends, bookmarked them, and   
   printed them out in what amounted to an accidental guerrilla   
   marketing campaign. There were Beatrice Savitz's Apricot Cookies,   
   posted by her granddaughter; lemon bars submitted by Ingrid, from a   
   German lady she met in Indiana more than twenty years prior; a   
   chocolate-chip-cookie recipe attributed to Hillary Clinton. "There's   
   always somebody in a friend group who goes, 'I hate their cookie   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)