The internet is the best recipe book ever – bigger and cheaper than any actual book, with seemingly infinite variations on recipes as simple as scrambled eggs and as complicated as spanakopita.
But online recipes have a problem.
Wordiness.
Take scrambled eggs, among the humblest dishes that humans (with hens’ help) ever created.
My web search turned up a recipe at pinchofyum.com for “Life Changing Soft Scrambled Eggs.” It typifies the problem.
On my laptop, I had to click the “down page” key 13 times and scroll through 588 words to find the actual recipe.
A recipe itself is seldom the problem. Pinchofyum’s scrambled-egg instructions filled a taut 179 words.
The problem is long, flowery preambles. They’re like mosquitoes in a Louisiana swamp – everywhere and never welcome. Web sites inflict them to induce us to linger and as scaffolding for advertising.
But I just want to make scrambled eggs! Don’t make me hunt for the recipe under a load of fake nostalgia.
As problems go, wordy online recipes are way closer to peeve than pandemic. But even peeves deserve their rants.
