What A Recipe's Long-Winded Intro Can Tell You About Its Quality
You've got a problem on your hands. It's Thanksgiving, and you've been commissioned to make pumpkin pie, which you've never done before, so you Google "pumpkin pie recipe" and click on the most delicious-looking thumbnail. It takes you to a cooking blog, but instead of a recipe, you see a thick block of text. Scrolling down the page, you realize this introduction goes for paragraphs on end. Do you read it, or scroll as fast as possible to the recipe below?
With search engines drawing us away from cookbooks in favor of a recipe-on-demand system, blogs have become the primary cooking resource for many, and nearly all of these sites preface their recipes with long intros. These infuriate cooks who want to get to the point, so much so that in 2021, a website called recipeasly launched, which automatically deleted intros when users input recipes from other sites. Some hailed it as a cure to one of the internet's most irritating ailments, but others blasted it for cheapening recipes. Recipeasly was soon shut down, but it exposed the powerful divide between intro readers and intro haters. What the debate missed was the fact that not all intros are equal. Some are useless, and some are useful. Understanding the difference tells you a lot about the recipe itself.
Recipe intros serve multiple purposes
If you look through classic cookbooks, you'll find that the recipes have very brief introduction blurbs, if any at all, so how did these long-winded intros become a thing? For that, you can blame Google. If you want your blog to gain any viewership, it needs to rank high in Google search results, which brings us to the issue of SEO — search engine optimization — a strategic approach to pushing websites further up the rankings. Google's algorithm prioritizes high word counts, so webpages with more text rank higher. The reasoning behind this is unclear and even seems counterintuitive, considering that modern audiences, having shorter attention spans, don't like to linger for long on anything, especially reading. Nevertheless, Google makes the rules, and blog creators must abide by them.
SEO may be the driving force behind long recipe intros, but what really matters is how the writer achieves that high word count. The best ones seize it as an opportunity to educate the reader further. For example, if an American blogger posts a Pakistani recipe, you might question their authority, but if they use the intro to reveal how they learned to cook this dish from their mother, who grew up amidst the street food scene of Lahore, you'd recognize their expertise. It's also helpful when a writer uses the intro to explain the reasoning behind their method. These should give you confidence in the recipe. Unfortunately, not all bloggers write such valuable intros.
What intros say about recipes
If a writer puts great thought into their introduction, they've probably done the same with the recipe itself. Beware of intros that only focus on SEO. The big red flag here is repetition. If you see the same terms repeated, the writer is probably keyword-stuffing. Other intros merely rephrase parts of the recipe itself. If the recipe says, "bake at 450 F for 30 minutes, or until golden brown," and the intro includes, "I like to finish the mac and cheese in the oven, and for this, I find that a high temperature helps a nice golden crust to form," the writer doesn't have enough valuable information to fill their intro.
These contrasting styles show that intro fans and haters have good points, and we need to understand that people approach recipes differently. Some people find they need the intro to understand the recipe, and other people want to see the recipe before committing to the intro so they can ensure it doesn't call for ingredients they can't eat or don't have access to. One way to please both parties is to place a "jump to recipe" button at the top of the page that automatically skips past the intro. The writer can still reach SEO demands and provide helpful information, while those in a hurry can get the quick overview they need before potentially returning to the intro.