Dear recipe website authors,
Here is a simple guide to what I am looking for when I stumble across your website at half past six while trying to remember how much flour to put into toad in the hole.
I would like a list of ingredients and required quantities, followed by the recipe. Ideally, the recipe will repeat the quantities of the ingredients, so I don't have to keep referring to the list of ingredients while preparing the recipe. That is all.
I do not want any of the following.
- a long preamble about your general dissatisfaction with similar recipes
- the history and origin story of your recipe
- a detailed explanation of why you use some specific ingredient over another
- a little rant about some weirdly specific thing that people often get wrong when trying to make similar recipes
- an unnecessary diversion into how to do something really obvious like peel a carrot
- why this recipe is better than other recipes
- how this recipe makes you feel
- the best time to make this recipe
- how much your family and friends appreciate this recipe
- the historical or cultural context of this recipe
I also do not want more than one photo of this recipe, or any unnecessary web 2.0 style widgets inexplicably jammed into the layout of the page that only make it slower to load and harder to navigate. I just want the ingredients and the recipe.
I especially don't want any of this if your recipe is for something particularly simple, like oven chips.
Yours sincerely,
A reader