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   recipe--my cookie recipe is better,'" David Quinn, one of the   
   co-owners, said, recalling the site's early days. And besides, he   
   added, "Every American wants to be famous, right?"   
      
   Hunt, who was understood to be the Emergent team's database genius,   
   realized that if a digital recipe archive was going to be successful   
   it'd have to offer more than just straight instructions. Tech has   
   been trying, and mostly failing, to improve on traditional cookbooks   
   for a long time. The Honeywell kitchen computer, which débuted in the   
   late sixties, was a paper-tape-reading meal-planning system that   
   required the homemaker to code. By the eighties, home computers were   
   being advertised as recipe-storing devices, but people seemed to   
   spend more time on them making spreadsheets or playing games. The   
   nineties saw the emergence of CD-ROM recipe books like the MasterCook   
   series. All things considered, it was probably easier to use a book.   
      
   With the growth of the Internet, people could finally start to   
   exchange recipes rather than just hoard them. Usenet, an all-purpose   
   mega-forum, had recipe-sharing message boards, but they were clunky   
   and difficult to search. For a more comprehensive resource, you could   
   go to Epicurious (tagline: "The taste of the web"), which scraped   
   recipes from across the Condé Nast stable of magazines. There was   
   also the more grassroots SOAR--the Searchable Online Archive of   
   Recipes--built by a student at U.C. Berkeley. It was thorough,   
   esoteric, and incredibly hard to follow.   
      
   Cookierecipe.com had to be different. Hunt built in features that   
   allowed users to search not just by ingredient but by multiple   
   ingredients, and by ingredients they wanted to avoid. Users could   
   convert from imperial to metric measures. Before Cookierecipe.com,   
   most recipes online were just facsimiles of those offline--blocks of   
   static text. But, over the first few years of the site, Hunt created   
   a recipe matrix, where if you entered, say, your grandmother's   
   chocolate-chip cookies it would be broken into discrete units of   
   data. Instead of "a cup of flour," the database would place "one cup"   
   in one column and "flour" in another. This made it possible for users   
   to scale a recipe up or down in a single click. Before the advent of   
   Google, Hunt and his team anticipated perhaps the biggest   
   transformation in cookery of the past century: that once you had   
   access to all the recipes in the world you'd need help finding what   
   you were actually looking for.   
      
   Cookierecipe started with a couple dozen recipes; by January, 1998,   
   it had nearly eight hundred. The team expanded their territory to   
   encompass Chickenrecipe.com, Cakerecipe.com, Pierecipe.com,   
   Thanksgivingrecipe.com, and more. In 1999, at around the time these   
   sites hit a million users combined, the group consolidated all the   
   sites under the übergeneralist banner that they still use today:   
   Allrecipes.com.   
      
   I came across Banana Cake VI (Allrecipes has many) while looking for   
   a dressed-up alternative to my usual dowdy, loaf-tin banana breads.   
   The recipe was uploaded to Cakerecipe.com in 1999 by Cindy Carnes, a   
   licensed nurse living in Melbourne, Iowa. It was a large,   
   tray-bake-style banana cake with cream-cheese frosting and a   
   preternaturally moist crumb--a recipe given to Carnes by a friend she   
   had gone to visit. Buttermilk and lemon juice add gentle acidity,   
   sharpening the banana flavor and keeping the fruit from browning so   
   much; baking soda--rather than baking powder--gives instant lift. The   
   real trick, though, is the technique. You cook the cake in a low   
   oven, lower than most people would trust is going to work, and then   
   put it in the freezer for forty-five minutes, right after you've   
   pulled it out of the oven, to arrest the cooking process. It's a   
   smart idea, especially for a large cake, for which it's easy to   
   overbake the edges before the center is set. Carnes told me, of the   
   friend who gave her the recipe, "her son worked in a bakery in St.   
   Louis, and he said, 'That's what we do with all of our cakes.' I told   
   her, 'We need to share this with the world.'"   
      
   Today, Carnes is sixty-seven years old and lives in Glenwood, Iowa.   
   Her mother ran a small restaurant called Val's Cafe. Carnes helped   
   with making pies there, and still considers herself a baker. About   
   twenty-five years ago, she was given some particularly great   
   peanut-butter fudge, and when she asked for the recipe she was told   
   it was online--somewhere called Allrecipes. "Back then, I wasn't on   
   the Internet much," she said. She tracked down the recipe and found   
   Creamy Peanut Butter Fudge, uploaded by a user named Janet Awaldt.   
   That fudge, and Allrecipes, has been part of Carnes's cooking ever   
   since.   
      
   Carnes is pretty typical for an Allrecipes user. Most visitors to the   
   site are women, with an average age in the fifties. She tends toward   
   simple recipes. Carnes lives a forty-minute drive from the nearest   
   decent grocery store, and she benefits from the skew toward recipes   
   that don't involve too many from-scratch ingredients or, indeed, too   
   many ingredients at all. When I asked Arie Knutson, Allrecipes'   
   senior editorial director of features, whether any city or area is a   
   particular stronghold, she stressed that the site is borderless, but   
   anyone who has spent even five minutes on it will notice that it has   
   a Midwestern lilt--to start, there are at least a hundred and eighty   
   Jell-O salads. In a food-media world largely defined by the coasts,   
   it is one of the most important sites cataloguing the culinary   
   proclivities of the country's middle tranche.   
      
   Like lots of Allrecipes users, Carnes has little time for the   
   preciousness that establishment food media can sometimes promote.   
   Take Martha Stewart: "She's telling us about the Madagascan vanilla   
   beans." Carnes's voice, an Iowa singsong, can wend from weary to   
   impassioned in the course of a single thought. "Well, honey,   
   Martha--I'm going to break this to you gently. I'm not going to pay   
   eight hundred dollars to make my own vanilla. I can get it for seven   
   dollars at the grocery store." She looks, instead, for simplicity.   
   Her Allrecipes uploads tend toward low-prep classics: a   
   family-favorite olive cheese ball, a simple yet kaleidoscopic taco   
   dip, and no-bake peanut-butter cookies. "I don't want to make my own   
   sauce," she told me. That night's dinner was cabbage rolls, an   
   Allrecipes number from a user going by Judy. In this preparation, the   
   ground-beef filling is wrapped in a delicate cabbage-leaf caul, and   
   then braised in canned tomato soup.   
      
   In 2009, Christopher Kimball, the co-founder of America's Test   
   Kitchen, wrote a eulogy for the late Gourmet magazine, the onetime   
   home of such revered food writers as Ruth Reichl, James Beard, Laurie   
   Colwin, M. F. K. Fisher, and Jonathan Gold. Kimball mourned it, and   
   saw the loss as part of a bigger problem in American gastronomic   
   life. It's a common complaint that, in the age of the Internet,   
   everyone's a critic; the other side of this is that everyone's a   
   chef. "Google 'broccoli casserole' and make the first recipe you   
   find. I guarantee it will be disappointing," Kimball wrote. He didn't   
   mention Allrecipes by name, although he didn't really need to. The   
   site has always championed the expertise of ordinary home cooks. An   
   early staff T-shirt depicted a wooden spoon in an upraised fist, with   
   a slogan about "breaking the hegemony of tyrant chefs."   
      
   Allrecipes exists in a long line of collectively authored recipe   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)