the saving of digital recipes
Now that you’ve made me a slave to your content, how the fuck do I organize all of it?
Because of the election, I am releasing this newsletter today (11.2) instead of Friday. I fervently believe that we must all be paying attention to what happens over the next few days, and I don’t want to put an unrelated essay into the noise and distract at a time when our attention must be elsewhere. If I hadn’t written this essay like two weeks ago, I wouldn’t even be putting something out there. That said, I have it, and I want to keep to my personal quota of publishing an essay every two weeks, so here it is. Maybe it’ll make you laugh or make you feel something besides abject dread over the next few days! Talk soon!
Hi again kids. Now that I’ve been mad and I’ve been sad, it’s time to get into one of my favorite things to get frustrated about: the storage of digital recipe content. I don’t make the rules, this just happened to be next.
So yeah, I’ve been floating around collecting recipes since the early days of Pinterest. I love a good cookbook, and these days, I buy more of them digitally than I’d care to admit. I lean heavily on the app Instapaper to save the ones I come across on the internet, and my Instagram saves are a nightmare to rifle through because honestly, half of them are recipes that someone posted and I wanted to save them. It’s like my parents and their wine buying problem: they don’t have an issue with the consumption of wine, but if they like the bottle they buy at costco, they’re going to buy a whole case. And, well, they don’t meet a lot of bottles they don’t like, so you can imagine what the state of their collection is.
This is precisely how I feel about the enormous amounts of data I have saved in various places. I save all of these random methods and recipes but really, I’m just going to pull a random pasta out of my ass with whatever ingredients I have on hand for dinner. In fact, honestly, pasta recipes are the ones I am most likely to save, and actually the ones that piss me off the most. Who uses only 12 ounces of the box?? Who stretches 8 ounces to feed four people? Who actually cares about parsley for garnish???????? It’s just fucking obscene. Inevitably there will be someone in the comments going “gosh the two tablespoons of olive oil in this is just too much so i just subbed in this calorie free butter thing that i sold my soul to satan to obtain” and let me tell you, NOTHING gets me riled up like stupid comments on recipes. Unrelated: Substack plz give me the power to use footnotes because that would have been an excellent footnote, and if college taught me anything, it’s that I make excellent footnotes. Moving on ...
What makes the recipe storage issue all the more frustrating is that it’s impossible to get people to talk about how they manage the piles of recipes they probably have. Everyone talks about how they keep track of their cookbook collections, or even how they weed out copies of things when they run out of space, but no one big in the industry is talking about how they store their digital finds. Some of us commoners like leaning on apps like Paprika, which like, fine, except not all recipes adhere to strict formatting requirements, nor do they have concrete measurements for me to enter into the little tiny boxes. I don’t need something that’ll spit a grocery list out at me, or convert everything from grams to ounces to shoefulls. I also don’t have a functioning printer, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a millennial who does. So the whole “ah just print it out and stick it in a binder” thing is passé. Bookmarking recipes, an obvious answer, is also a non-starter. The internet is constantly changing, and while this is a normal thing, if I find a recipe gem in the pile of crap that is pinterest, I don’t want to leave it on a board or in my browser bookmarks because it could end up lost in a deleted blog’s lonely data imprint. The same goes for those pandemic driven instagram posts of chefs and writers sharing a beloved recipe; they could rebrand in a year and delete everything, as people are wont to do. Good for them but I need that chicken roasting method because the three or four that I have already aren’t quite right and how am I supposed to hybridize all of them if I’m missing a source method?
For now, I’ve saved my most commonly referenced recipes in the name note-taking/word-processing app that I draft essays in. Bear is delightful and easy to use (this isn’t sponsored, I’m such a tiny writer, but hey, Bear, baby, sponsor me!) and has a really slick tagging system that functions similarly to how my brain itself functions. I used to use Evernote, and had used it for years, but it was clunky and slow and bloated with crap I didn’t need. I just copy and paste recipes over, link the source URL if I can, and then tag it with whatever is relevant. It’s tedious, but it works fine for now. If you didn’t know, I don’t have a regular computer anymore. I retired my beastly old MacBook after nine (!!!!!) years of dedicated service. I type everything using a wireless keyboard and an iPad. So, having an app that can do this without a mouse and not make me want to rip my hair out? Game changing.
But this system still leaves me wanting. In some ways it’s like those commonplace books that journaling nerds get really into. It’s nice having things compiled in a way I understand. But at the same time, it still feels kind of icky to copy and paste things over, even if it’s for personal use and I link to source material and stuff. It’s not like I’ve illicitly obtained this content. It’s just out there floating on the internet ocean, waiting to be seen to begin with. It’s easier than battling my nonfunctioning printer and sticking it in a binder. So why does it feel so weird to just stick this content in a note taking app? Isn’t this what they’re kind of for? The storage of things you want to remember?
Perhaps my concern is that I’ll save something that I really don’t have the use for. The digital age seems to want to be minimal in some ways. Sleek and streamlined, you don’t have extra shit floating around that you don’t need. Obviously, this isn’t true. My dad is a small business owner (hi dad) and his computer’s home screen is literally the stuff of nightmares, clogged with different files placed over other files that really, could all just be in one folder. But as my dad would say, storage is cheap, get more than you need! And that’s attainable with the way a lot of these apps and services are. I have plenty of room to save redundant or useless things. And I’m in control of what I save, so what’s wigging me out about all this?
The consumption of content is what the internet is primarily used for, be it porn, social networking, or information searches. All of these services are content oriented. Someone generates or creates content, posts it somewhere, and we, the consumer, take it in however we see fit. That something in my lizard brain has the need to hoard specific kinds of content (recipes, in this case) should not be surprising. Humans are consumers, as reductive and capitalistic as that sounds. We consume foods and oxygen in order to survive, and we save things for times of need, and sometimes, simply for posterity. Over time, we’ve wired ourselves to consume other things, like books or music, and even past that to clothes and personal care products. Internet media of various types is no different.
This brings me to my big question: in saving all sorts of recipes, have I begun to devalue their creation? It’s no secret that food media, both mainstream, countercultural, and homespun (think food blog), takes labor to produce. I suppose there’s some asshole out there who thinks that it’s easy and that anyone can do it, but no, writing and producing good content takes a lot of work. People should be compensated fairly for it, but a lot of the content that gets saved, by either myself, or others, is available for free. This can be for various reasons. People who run blogs sometimes do it as a hobby, or take in ad revenue when you scroll to the recipe. Others are big media publications that don’t have paywalls, for whatever reason. Very rarely, it’s free because someone wanted to share it with others. With all this in mind, we have to remember that even if someone doesn’t bother testing their recipes, they still had to type it up, they still have to maintain the website, they still have to put all of this hidden labor into this project just for some asshole (me, the asshole is me) to come along and save it, only to loose it in some page saving app for the rest of eternity. It feels wrong to consume this content without giving it a second thought.
Obviously, I’m here, giving it some second thoughts, and more. Bots may write a lot of shit on the internet, but the best content is still written by people with lives and time. We would do well to remember that. At the same time we have to be mindful about what we consume and decide if it’s something we need or actually want in our brains. This whole essay was fueled by recipe fatigue. There are so many blogs and accounts that it’s exhausting trying to take it all in. And it’s stressing me out! I don’t think I’m the only one but maybe I am! I don’t know these things! And like, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people who deserve more attention, and a lot of people who shouldn’t get the attention they do get. I can think of blogs that got cookbook deals and shouldn’t have, and I can think of others who totally deserve them and either don’t have a deal or don’t want one. But I can’t deny that they all put work into what they produce, whether or not it looks like it. When I find a content creator we love, I get really into what they produce. It is, however, often thankless, and it can feel strange to support one writer with money, and get another writer’s content for free. There isn’t really a solution for this, except to keep quietly cheering from the sidelines.
Have I really devalued the content produced by these folks by saving it? No, but I have devalued it somewhat for myself. And I think that’s unfair to content creators. So what’s the solution? Mindful consumption? Maybe. There are all sorts of ways to support content you like or lean on. A lot of popular blogs and accounts have cookbooks or Patreon accounts you can support if you’re able. Maybe the stuff you like comes from a niche magazine or writer and there’s a subscription you can get. Maybe it’s for free, and all you need to do is leave nice comment every once in a while. All I’m asking (of myself, and maybe you) is that we are careful about what we consume. There’s so much crap out there that we could put in our heads. It’s okay to just step back and let it all flow by without us. We don’t have to gorge ourselves on content to feel connected with people. Maybe we just need to value it a little more.
Cooking is still something I’m dragging my feet around with, but I’ve managed to get a few nice meals out. A few days ago I did a really nice squash soup. No recipe for that really, it’s more like a method. I slow roast a whole butternut (pricked with a paring knife to prevent explosions) at 350 for an hour or two, just until it’s cooked through. A paring knife will slide in easily when it’s cooked. You can either fridge it and use it for something else (maybe this butternut risotto?) or you can make a blender soup. To make a soup I caramelize/sauté an onion until it starts getting really nice and brown at the edges, then deglaze with stock and add the squash (scooped from the skins, seeds and pulp discarded) and any spices I want to bring to the party. I let it warm through and then blend it with a stick blender until velvety and delicious. Sometimes I add more stock to make it thinner, or maybe a splash of cream or coconut milk (the canned kind, which is to say, the only kind) for richness. To top it, I’ll cube up some bread, toss it with olive oil, and then toast until golden. If the squash is already baked, this whole thing takes maybe 20 minutes. Stupid easy, but like, high impact. The sort of cooking we need right now.
For dumb internet stuff, I’ve been leaning hard on chillhop playlists to keep my heart steady as we head into this insane time. I also have a few articles that have been nice to read, like this one on the color russet, or this really wild interview regarding the owner of a joke website. And then there’s always Samin with important insight on cookbooks.
Questions, comments, cries of pain? Are you enjoying what you’re reading? Do you hate it? Is there something that you’re just dying to tell me or just dying to hear a hot take on? Please tell me about it! I’m flying totally blind and while yeah, I’m writing what I want to write and doing it on my terms, I get stuck sometimes. I’d love to hear from you, just reply to this email or leave comment below to talk to me about whatever! Stay safe and vigilant <3