Online recipe intros are as polarizing as ever
There’s no doubt that anyone searching for a recipe online has had to, at some point, scroll through an extensive headnote first. Though frustrating to the home cook who only needs ingredients and instructions, long intros and anecdotes can be a necessary evil for reasons that often get lost in Twitter-based hot takes. For one thing, professional food bloggers understand that they must facilitate an emotional connection to the audience if they want to grow their followings. More pragmatically, the more keyword-rich content that precedes the recipe, the more likely a search-engine algorithm will deem the page an authority. Still, the debate about recipe headnotes rages on, most recently at Slate.
