Subj : Allrecipes, part 2 To : All From : Ben Collver Date : Tue Oct 01 2024 10:45:27 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." From: .