Allrecipes, America's Most Unruly Cooking Web Site
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by Ruby Tandoh

A few months ago, I found myself in possession of a bag of apples and
craving an apple pie, of the archetypal cooling-on-the-window-ledge
variety. I pictured a double-crust flaky pastry around apple and
cinnamon--not too complicated to make on a week night, but robust
enough that I'd be able to slice a clean, thick wedge. Despite
knowing how to make apple pie, I wanted the peace of mind that can
come only from following a trusted recipe. I have more cookbooks than
my bookshelves can support, including at least a dozen that could've
proffered something reliable and extensively fussed over. I ignored
them and Googled "apple pie recipe."

The search engine quickly returned some options. First was "Homemade
apple pie," from Good Food, a British site. (The algorithm tends to
meet us where we are, which in my case is London.) Next, from the
more boutique recipe sites, a run of superlatives--"Best Apple Pie
Recipe We've Ever Made," "My Perfect Apple Pie," "Apple Pie Recipe
with the Best Filling," "My Favorite Apple Pie"--laden with
byzantine, keyword-riddled preambles. I stopped at the eighth result:
"Apple Pie by Grandma Ople," from Allrecipes.com. It showed up next
to a thumbnail photo that I probably could've taken on my phone. The
preview text cut straight to the ingredients list, whereas other
recipes had started with more of a hard sell. ("The pie crust is
perfection and the filling will surprise and delight you.") Grandma
Ople's version seemed low-key, amenable to the ordinary constraints
of my kitchen and my patience. It had more than twelve thousand
ratings, Google told me, with an average of 4.8 out of five stars. I
clicked on through.

If you have searched online for any classic American recipe at any
point in the past twenty-five years, you will almost certainly have
encountered Allrecipes. Feed the Google search bar "best chocolate
chip cookies" and an Allrecipes version, submitted by a user going by
Dora and with more than fourteen thousand five hundred almost
unanimously glowing reviews, will probably come up on the first page
of results. The site lacks the gravitas of Bon Appétit or the Times
cooking section; instead, it falls in the category of sites you never
really intend to end up on. Like the Internet itself, Allrecipes
suffers for its ubiquity. You might not recall that you've used it,
even if you've cooked Grandma Ople's apple pie every fall for the
past decade.

The recipes on Allrecipes are nearly all user-submitted. This gives
it an aura of shambolic good will, a cross between a church cookbook
and a fan-run Wiki. The site has a 4.5-star mac-and-cheese recipe
posted under the username g0dluvsugly. One of the most popular
recipes on the platform is John Chandler's 2001 upload "World's Best
Lasagna" which could be called the most popular lasagna in the world:
more than twenty thousand ratings, nearly fifteen thousand
evangelical reviews, and more than seven million views per year. In
2013, Chandler was invited to talk about it on "Good Morning
America"; when he died, in 2022, he was eulogized on Allrecipes.

The site's anarchic tendency can be charming. It also evokes the
cautionary "too many cooks." Take the messy roster of carrot cakes:
one anonymously authored carrot cake is a traditional version; Best
Carrot Cake Ever, by Nan, involves precooking the carrots; Carrot
Cake XII, made with canned, puréed carrots, is unfortunately a dud.
Because the site relies mostly on targeted searches, the recipes that
do well tend to be the ones that people already know they want: meat
loaf, Cinnabon dupes, seven-layer dips. Often, the best-performing
recipes have a smart but subtle hack. In the case of my apple pie, it
was simmering butter with sugar first, then pouring the mixture over
the lattice crust before baking, letting it glaze the crust and
trickle down onto the fruit. This isn't the traditional way, but it
results in a richer pie, with a crispy, caramelized crust.

Since it started, Allrecipes has become a repository for more than a
hundred and thirteen thousand crowdsourced recipes. Irma S.
Rombauer's "Joy of Cooking," perhaps the most influential American
cookbook of all time, has more than twenty million copies in
circulation, since it was first self-published a century ago;
Allrecipes.com reaches somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million
home cooks each month. You won't see intricate methods or nerdy
adventures in technique here--just recipes, backstories,
transparently bad ideas, homespun strokes of genius, delicately
Midwestern one-upmanship, and, collectively, one of the greatest
archives of American food culture the country has produced.

What is now Allrecipes began with a crew of archeology students at
the University of Washington. Tim Hunt, Mark Madsen, Carl Lipo,
Michael Pfeffer, and David Quinn, along with Dan Shepherd, a
Web-designer friend of theirs, ran a scrappy Web company called
Emergent Media, making sites for a range of customers (the Illinois
Department for Natural Resources, Microsoft) using a shared Internet
line and a few servers in an office cupboard. Domain names were
abundant at the time, and the group wanted to start a site of their
own. They tried out a few concepts: ultimatefrisbee.com,
roadsidereviews.com (a kind of proto-Yelp), beerinstitute.com. Porn
came up as one possibility, although when it went to a secret ballot
the vote returned unanimous nos. They took a chance instead on
something else they could bank on bored, Internet-surfing Americans
seeking out, and registered the domain Cookierecipe.com.

The site, created by Hunt and co-created by Sheperd, with the others
as business partners, went live on July 28, 1997. The guys seeded the
site with a few cookie recipes from family and friends, but the idea
was that the contributions would ultimately be crowdsourced, with
visitors uploading their own. They'd wondered whether people would
bother typing out their recipes for no money or measurable reward,
but they found themselves quickly inundated. Cooks sent in their
recipes, e-mailed their entries to friends, bookmarked them, and
printed them out in what amounted to an accidental guerrilla
marketing campaign. There were Beatrice Savitz's Apricot Cookies,
posted by her granddaughter; lemon bars submitted by Ingrid, from a
German lady she met in Indiana more than twenty years prior; a
chocolate-chip-cookie recipe attributed to Hillary Clinton. "There's
always somebody in a friend group who goes, 'I hate their cookie
recipe--my cookie recipe is better,'" David Quinn, one of the
co-owners, said, recalling the site's early days. And besides, he
added, "Every American wants to be famous, right?"

Hunt, who was understood to be the Emergent team's database genius,
realized that if a digital recipe archive was going to be successful
it'd have to offer more than just straight instructions. Tech has
been trying, and mostly failing, to improve on traditional cookbooks
for a long time. The Honeywell kitchen computer, which débuted in the
late sixties, was a paper-tape-reading meal-planning system that
required the homemaker to code. By the eighties, home computers were
being advertised as recipe-storing devices, but people seemed to
spend more time on them making spreadsheets or playing games. The
nineties saw the emergence of CD-ROM recipe books like the MasterCook
series. All things considered, it was probably easier to use a book.

With the growth of the Internet, people could finally start to
exchange recipes rather than just hoard them. Usenet, an all-purpose
mega-forum, had recipe-sharing message boards, but they were clunky
and difficult to search. For a more comprehensive resource, you could
go to Epicurious (tagline: "The taste of the web"), which scraped
recipes from across the Condé Nast stable of magazines. There was
also the more grassroots SOAR--the Searchable Online Archive of
Recipes--built by a student at U.C. Berkeley. It was thorough,
esoteric, and incredibly hard to follow.

Cookierecipe.com had to be different. Hunt built in features that
allowed users to search not just by ingredient but by multiple
ingredients, and by ingredients they wanted to avoid. Users could
convert from imperial to metric measures. Before Cookierecipe.com,
most recipes online were just facsimiles of those offline--blocks of
static text. But, over the first few years of the site, Hunt created
a recipe matrix, where if you entered, say, your grandmother's
chocolate-chip cookies it would be broken into discrete units of
data. Instead of "a cup of flour," the database would place "one cup"
in one column and "flour" in another. This made it possible for users
to scale a recipe up or down in a single click. Before the advent of
Google, Hunt and his team anticipated perhaps the biggest
transformation in cookery of the past century: that once you had
access to all the recipes in the world you'd need help finding what
you were actually looking for.