Skip to recipe
Making fun of long recipe intros isn't funny, it's a missed opportunity
I saw an old tweet doing the rounds again last month making fun of long recipe intros. Maybe you saw it too or have seen something like it; it’s been a running joke for years now.
LOL 😂, right?
Actually, no.
How do you see a recipe?
Let’s go back to first principles: how do you see a recipe?
You savour good food writing as much as the food. You don’t have cookbooks, you have a cookbook collection. You curl up with cookbooks on the couch or read them in bed as if they were novels.
If this is you, then you probably see a recipe as a story – or at the very least, as a vehicle for storytelling.
If you draw a Venn diagram and put food in one circle and stories in the other, where they intersect, you’ll find connection. But you could just as easily say that a recipe lives in that intersection.
At the other send of the spectrum is a recipe as a set of instructions, a means to an end.
There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but it’s a missed opportunity. When you divorce a recipe from its story, it tends to reduce it to a commodity with no more heart or context than the corporate test kitchen recipes on the back of food packaging.
We’re all busy, sure. Not everyone cares about food or cooking. And sometimes, no matter how into food you are, you just need to get dinner on the table on a day when you’ve run out of the energy or bandwidth to care very much about it.
I send out a weekly newsletter for my publishing house and every week I despair that the feedback report that Mailchimp automatically generates says it’s too long. According to them, I need to avoid long sentences and keep the whole thing to under 250 words so that it can be read in 45 seconds.
The equivalent of this in food writing is the ‘skip to recipe’ button on food blogs and websites that you can click to whoosh straight past the story and images.
Recipes and women’s stories
Okay, so what, you might be thinking. If you’re not into the writing part of food writing, just keep on scrolling.
But here’s the thing: when people publicly poke fun at long recipe intros on food blogs, there’s a sexist streak to it. Most food bloggers are women, so when long intros are being made fun of, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the subtext is women’s stories don’t matter.
Women’s stories and the domestic sphere they may be set in or the domestic topics they may address have a long history of being looked down on, whether in literature (aka chick lit), in films (chick flicks) or in food, where traditionally women cooked (tirelessly, thanklessly) in the home and men cooked professionally and for greater glory.
And there are few things more domestic than a recipe, which for decades was relegated to women’s magazines or the ‘women’s pages’ of newspapers before they got rebranded as the lifestyle section.
It’s not for you
When we talk about the enduring popularity of cookbooks in an age when you can get any recipe for free online, the storytelling aspect is often cited as a key reason why people still love them.
So while there is an appreciative audience for writers like Paul Flynn, Mark Diacono, Diana Henry, Bee Wilson, Debora Robertson and of course Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater who write beautifully before getting to the recipe (or to put it another way, write beautifully as well as sharing recipes), food bloggers who do it – who are almost always writing for free, for the love of it and without the benefit of professional editing – risk get slated.
There is a fundamental disconnect here.
The problem is that people who buy and use cookbooks purposefully seek them out (and pay for them), while people who have landed on a food blog may have only got there because of an online search looking for a recipe for dinner that night.
The disconnect is that the blogger isn’t doing their work for the ‘skip to recipe’ reader. Quite simply, that reader has come to the wrong place.
Seth Godin often talks about doing work that matters for people who care. So the people who want to skim content in 45 seconds and skip to recipe? They are not our audience, our target market. They are not who we are doing our work for.
In his 09 February 2023 blog post, he writes:
Most people want you to make something cheap, write something short, share something funny, and fit in.
But the people you serve … they might want something else.
The few people you need to thrive in your work might want you to write something they’ll remember for a long time, or to take then on a journey that’s thrilling and challenging and unique.
Or perhaps these are the people that want to buy something that costs a lot but is worth more than it costs.
It’s okay to say, “it’s not for you,” to most people.
In fact, that’s the only way to do work that matters.
The moral of the story? There’s nothing wrong with being in the the ‘skip to recipe’ camp – but this work is not for you.
It helps if both parties – writer and reader – recognise that, because as soon as writers start bending to the likes of Mailchimp’s ‘250 words or fewer’ advice or taking the mean-spirited criticism that their intros are too long to heart, thinking they are now writing for everyone, they are instead writing for no one.
The last thing we need is less writing, more content.
If I’ve learned anything from starting my food-focused niche publishing company, it’s that we are hungry for connection, for work that matters. Recipes and stories are two ways to do that. They are both literally made to be shared.
Skipping to the recipe will still get a tasty dinner on the table, but it’s a missed opportunity. For the ‘recipe as story’ camp – for our audience – our lives are richer for reading them.
