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   projects, which reflect vernacular cooking in granular and   
   occasionally unflattering detail. Community cookbooks circulated by   
   rotary associations, Girl Scout troops, synagogues, churches,   
   sororities, and military wives' circles are perhaps the most prolific   
   expression of American culinary thought; from the eighteen-fifties   
   until the end of the century, recipes in the Times were mainly   
   crowdsourced, and collected in a drab if effective home-economics   
   section called "The Household." Amanda Hesser, the founder of Food52,   
   curated an extensive selection of the recipes for the 2010 edition of   
   "The Essential New York Times Cookbook." Among them were broiled   
   steak with oysters and Boston cream doughnut. She told me, "It was a   
   very candid look at: what were people thinking about? What were they   
   needing to know?"   
      
   In a 2002 article for the Times, under the headline "America's Real   
   Foodie Bible," Regina Schrambling reported on the cultural heft of   
   Taste of Home magazine--a publication that almost exclusively   
   features reader-submitted recipes, and which, in 2002, many cooks   
   outside the Midwest had never heard of. It was, at that point, the   
   most popular cooking magazine in the country, its circulation of   
   nearly five million more than that of Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and   
   Gourmet combined. Carnes vaguely remembers one of her recipes being   
   printed there. It's the only food magazine that she ever subscribed   
   to, until it got too expensive. By that point, she'd set up an   
   Allrecipes account instead.   
      
   By 2001, Allrecipes was the most popular recipe site on the Internet.   
   A couple of years before, the co-owners had brought on a new C.E.O.,   
   Bill Moore, who had conceived and launched the Starbucks Frapuccino   
   and, as it happens, oversaw the MasterCook CD-ROMs. As food   
   businesses took note of the site's some 3.5 million users, ad revenue   
   increased, and brands like Hershey's and Quaker Oats began posting   
   advertorial recipes on the site. Before long, Allrecipes was being   
   courted for a buyout by precisely the establishment media that it had   
   tried to disrupt.   
      
   Although the site continued to grow, it never quite resolved a   
   dilemma that had beset it from the start: does an autarky of   
   passionate home cooks need an editor? When you give people the   
   freedom to upload the recipes they love, you can bank on many of them   
   being average and at least some of them being bad. Even a great cook   
   may be inept at recipe writing, a complex exercise that involves   
   carefully recording your work and anticipating any of the million   
   places where an amateur might slip up.   
      
   Early on, the co-owners developed a system for moderating the recipes   
   as they were sent in--checking whether they were plagiarized;   
   scanning for any glaring errors, like tablespoons of baking soda   
   where it should have been teaspoons; adjudicating whether a   
   submission was a recipe at all. ("Somebody tried to tell us to heat   
   up a burrito and add a bottle of taco sauce to it, and nacho sauce,   
   and add cheese and put it in the oven. This is not a recipe," Quinn   
   recalled. "But I immediately went home and I was, like, 'This is   
   awesome.'") So long as the recipe made sense, it was good enough to   
   allow onto the site--and that's how something like Carrot Cake XII,   
   the dud with the canned carrots, passed muster.   
      
   But it quickly became obvious that the best approach was to let the   
   cooks be the judge: it's the reviews, even more than the recipes,   
   that make the site. Look at its all-time top recipes today--Good   
   Old-Fashioned Pancakes, Easy Meatloaf, Taco Seasoning, To Die For   
   Blueberry Muffins--all vetted by tens of thousands of home cooks, and   
   all uploaded in Allrecipes' golden age, between 1998 and 2002, when   
   there were comparatively few other resources for finding recipes   
   online. It's hard to imagine John Chandler's "World's Best Lasagna"   
   doing quite so well if it were uploaded now, to a busier and more   
   cynical Internet.   
      
   In 2006, Allrecipes sold to Reader's Digest, and within a couple of   
   years all the original co-owners had left. Six years later,   
   Allrecipes sold to Meredith (now Dotdash Meredith), the media group   
   that owns Food & Wine, The Spruce Eats, Serious Eats, and EatingWell.   
   In the years since, the site has taken on the mannerisms of   
   establishment food media, in which editorial content is pushed to the   
   fore. Go on Allrecipes today and you will see a selection of   
   highlighted user recipes, but also more carefully vetted pieces such   
   as "Chef John's Best Recipes for When Summer Tomatoes Are at Their   
   Peak" and "8 Essential Tips for Summer Hosting (and Actually Enjoying   
   Yourself)."   
      
   The old, more chaotic Allrecipes survives in the archives, but is   
   increasingly hard to find. Of the hundred and thirteen thousand   
   recipes on the site, some fifty-five thousand are actually accessible   
   by search. Many older recipes have been suppressed, and new ones now   
   undergo a more rigorous vetting process. "The submissions go into a   
   queue that our editorial team reviews for publication," Molly Fergus,   
   the site's senior vice-president and associate group general manager,   
   told me via e-mail. "Recipes are only searchable on site (or on   
   Google) once they are accepted and edited by our recipe team." In   
   some ways, it's a more reliable site now--curation means that the   
   test-kitchen-approved recipes tend to rise to the top of the search   
   page, and those with bad reviews can be found and reëvaluated by the   
   editorial teams. Yet it feels less like a place for home cooks to   
   gather and experiment than it used to. And certain tools that Hunt   
   put in place in the early days--searching by multiple ingredients,   
   scaling recipes up or down--are gone. Carnes told me that she's had   
   recipes languish in the backlog for years. In striving to   
   professionalize itself, the site has lost the often troublesome   
   entropy that once made it so fun.   
      
   Tim Hunt left Allrecipes shortly after the sale to Reader's Digest,   
   and hasn't used it as much since then, except for cookie recipes. He   
   hardly cooked when he first engineered the site, but he's now a   
   proper culinary nerd, smoking chiles and making his own cider vinegar   
   from the fruits of an Asian-pear tree in his garden. On the phone, he   
   enthused about the chef Derek Sarno--"a vegan, but not a fascist   
   vegan"--and told me about a Sarno-inspired sandwich he'd recently   
   made for dinner, with blocks of fried, spiced tofu and really good   
   barbecue sauce. Hunt also grows buckwheat, a favorite ingredient of   
   mine, and after we hung up we exchanged recipes: he sent a link for   
   buckwheat crinkle cookies that he and his wife make each Christmas; I   
   sent a recipe for buckwheat shortbread in return.   
      
   At its best, this is how Allrecipes worked--as a kind of culinary   
   hive mind, a place that understood that the only thing people like   
   more than making recipes is comparing them. (My buckwheat shortbread   
   was caught up in the purgatorial Allrecipes queue for a few months,   
   but is now finally online.) One of Cindy Carnes's most treasured   
   contributions is called Mary's Meatballs, named for a nurse Carnes   
   worked with in the nineties. You take a jar of chili sauce, a cup of   
   brown sugar, a sixteen-ounce can of whole cranberries, and a can of   
   sauerkraut, put it all in a pan, and heat over a gentle flame. Once   
   it's simmering, you pour it over three pounds of meatballs, and bake   
   for an hour in an oven at three hundred and fifty degrees. "She   
   brought those all the time to everything, every potluck and   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)