Colophon: Why Recipes?

It is a well-known and popular fact that the internet became as popular as it has chiefly because of how easy it made it for just about anyone to access new and exciting recipes through email, newsgroups, and Gopher. Of course, with the arrival of graphical web browsers and the upstart HTTProtocol, those new and exciting (text-based) recipes were largely abandoned for new and exciting (graphical) pornography.

To survive this, today's modern recipe websites are almost exclusively comprised of lengthy contrived backstories through which the hungry reader must wade in the hope of finding an actual recipe at the end. These dubious and irrelevant tracts of text exist so that the paid-sponsorship advertisments have somewhere to sit and the behavioural telemetry trackers have something to track. These blocks of bloviation are also frequently fleshed out with titillating photographs of food: plump dishes and ripe ingredients, dripping with shiny glazes and oozing flavour at you.

You might feel that such pictures, injected with folksy back-stories, are there to inspire you to cook -- if not also to live -- like the recipe's author. Unfortunately the real effect, as with most of what you see on the web these days, is to squash your (perfectly normal) reality right up close against the (quite extraordinary) carefully crafted fictional reality of the recipe-land, and that is not an ingredient for a healthy life in anyone's book. And of course, it's all there and it works very well, to try and sell people things or to soak up their information so it can be sold to someone, whereas all you really wanted was to try something different for dinner.

So here are recipes stripped of their kitsch essays, glamorous photographs, and social media trackers. Cook them how you like and enjoy whatever comes out at the end: it's all yours! A recipe here only goes up once I have cooked and enjoyed it myself several times, but there's no accounting for taste. So if you cook something and it's good then let me know. If it's awful, well, that's what you get for trusting the internet.

Addendum: since writing this, a great tool called 'Plain Old Recipe' has appeared, which takes horribly over-wrought web recipes and returns the plain text recipe, distilled and stripped of crap. I think it will come in very handy!

Plain Old Recipe (www implementation)

Plain Old Recipe (GitHub)

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