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A few months ago, and in possession of a bag of apples, I found myself 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 weeknight, 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 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 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 everything at the hospital,” Carnes told me. People seemed to love them. Mary handed over the recipe after she was diagnosed as having terminal breast cancer. “She said, ‘Please make my meatballs. And remember me.’ ” She died in 1995.
Right now, Carnes is in the middle of putting together a family cookbook, using an old collection of her aunt’s as a scaffold for her own additions—clipped from copies of Taste of Home, printed out from Allrecipes, or kept on a scrap of paper, then painstakingly typed up. So far, she’s collected more than a thousand entries; Mary’s Meatballs is among them. Now she’s got to find a way to actually print and share the volume with her family. If only there were a place for all this—a forum big and lawless enough to host several generations’ worth of eclectic culinary lore. “Well,” she said with a sigh. “That’s the bugaboo.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
