21st Century Recipes Are More Heartwarming Than Ever
My grandmother gave me a beautiful, heartwarming Christmas gift this year: a simple handmade recipe book consisting of her personal favorites that she has collected and created over the years. Each recipe was carefully written onto an index card and lovingly tucked into a clear photo pocket for ease of access. Every other page is sprinkled with pictures of my childhood.
Not only did this cause my heart to explode, it also drew my attention to this revelation: index cards were originally intended for recipes! It turns out that this is not true at all. But the thought of confining a recipe to an 3 x 5 index card did send me down a fun little convoluted train of thought that I’d like to share with you today. You know, the kind usually reserved for stoners and History Channel conspiracists.
Basically, it dawned on me that I rarely ever see a published recipe that is nothing but the ingredients and the actual cooking instructions — in other words, the parts that would fit onto a 3 x 5 index card.
Sometime between the era of pairing savory things with Jello and today, has reading a recipe slowly morphed into becoming an emotional investment for Americans?
Eventually, it must have become the norm for recipes to be printed alongside some sort of context that may not only explain the recipe’s methods, but also works to sell the recipe by making you feel good about the imaginary life you could live if you cooked it. “These piping hot blueberry muffins are perfect to pack in a picnic basket on your way to lunch with the Hemsworth brothers on a scenic hillside” — that sort of thing. People started buying celebrity cookbooks to read the backstory behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s Almond & Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Rhubarb Compote (that is a real name of a thing you can put in your mouth) and its coinciding lifestyle advice, imagining that THEY TOO CAN HAVE IT ALL!
Any fellow devout follower of Our Lord and Savior, Pinterest, understands the scale to which we have since expanded upon the Recipe Backstory. When you log into Pinterest for your daily fix of idealism and stumble into that mouthwatering mason jar brownie recipe, two clicks will take you to the source of the picture, which is often a personal blog. If you are as shameless a consumer as I am, you look forward to the instant gratification of getting your hands on that recipe because “I need that trendy brownie in my mouth by tonight, so help me God.”
Here is the gist of what you might end up scrolling and scrolling through before you ever get to the recipe though:
“Those of you who know me know that I am a chocolaholic. My craving for everything chocolate especially flares up whenever I’m doused in hormone-induced frustration, or whenever I rewatch Titanic. Well, last week, school was cancelled for snow, so the girls and I decided to start a Leo movie marathon on the couch. As you can imagine, chocolate was necessary!
So I turned to the recipe book for this little gem: Mason Jar Dark Chocolate Lava Brownies! This is hands-down my most requested dessert. The last time I made them was for Tom’s company fundraiser last March, and everyone was asking about them. I told everybody they are actually a modified version of a family recipe on my father’s side. There’s a delightful little story that goes along with it:
It began the day my great-great grandfather’s uncle’s sister was born…”
Seven paragraphs (and twenty inexplicably-professional-looking close up shots of the mason jar brownies) later, you get to the ingredients and instructions.
Why??
What I find myself wondering is why, in the age of 6-second videos and 140 character tweets, have Americans gone from the recipe card to the recipe saga? I would be inclined to think that we’ve all lost the attention span for reading someone’s personal life details when we have The Ultimate Gluten Free Parmesan Chicken Casserole to get in the oven and Vines to watch while it cooks. I would be expecting a Recipes app featuring virtual 3 x 5 index cards and sharing/saving capabilities (is it too late to trademark that?).
But that is clearly not the case.
The most ancient community unifier
In the Netflix series Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Our Other Lord And Savior, Michael Pollan, pretty much answers that question. Essentially, he says that the emotional aspect of modern recipe reading was there all along:
“Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.”
And the people seem to agree.
So it’s no mystery that something innate within us wants to connect with other people over food, specifically. I guess it’s an intuitive conclusion that shouldn’t be surprising to me. Experts like Pollan think we’ve likely been using meals as a source of connection through storytelling ever since nomadic hunter-gatherer times.
But what I find so intriguing about the personal blog recipe headnote, though, are the following observations:
- Recipe headnotes on the internet can be written by anyone. You don’t have to have Gwyneth’s glamour or Bobby Flay’s resume to write about the amazing tater tot casserole recipe you post on a personal blog from your home in Anywheresville.
- Even still, people put a lot of time and energy into writing them AND reading them. At least, relative to the time commitment people seem to be willing to make on other things shared via social media. How do I know people are taking the time to read long headnotes? Because everybody keeps writing long headnotes that sound a lot like everybody else’s long headnotes. This points pretty clearly to some time spent on community sharing.
- People are willing to spend this time and energy to create headnotes even when they are not selling anything. I think this is some key evidence for the idea that the headnotes are really meaningful to people. In lifestyle magazines and Barnes & Noble cookbooks, headnotes may have originally served the purpose of hooking you in for a sell, but on personal internet blogs, the writer of the headnote isn’t getting any revenue. They’re doing it because they have a story to share.
- People want to spend time connecting over food EVEN IF THEY’RE ONLY DOING IT VIRTUALLY.***
It would be easy to assume that the PBRH (Personal Blog Recipe Headnote), heavy with the personal life details of a faceless stranger, is yet another product of the vanity epidemic plaguing America, and what are they teaching the kids in school these days??
But I’d prefer to think of the PBRH as an internet success story: people can now access ways to connect with others over shared food from around the world, and they can share the stories that go alongside that food in a variation of the same way that tribes have bonded for eons. And as a result, people (Americans who spend a lot of time on Pinterest, at least) are actually slowing down and taking more time to read recipes than we used to. Hey, the internet is actually being used the way it was intended to be — developing a global tribe! And we’re investing time in it meaningfully! Bring out the party blowers!
When my grandmother gave me that homemade recipe book, my heart exploded because I knew what the implied subtext was: “I spent time on this because I care about you and I value our relationship. I want you to be happy and well-fed. I want you to enjoy and draw meaning from that thing you have to do 3 times a day to stay alive.” When people take the time to share recipe headnotes, it’s nice to think that maybe they mean the same thing. Isn’t that a small reason to celebrate for humanity?
***WHEN I READ CAPS LOCK NOW, I HEAR THE TEXT IN AZIZ ANSARI’S VOICE. THIS IS WHAT IT IS TO LIVE IN 2016.
