When it comes to recipes, does more always mean better?

It can be difficult to imagine cooking before the internet, but it was not that terribly long ago when you had to rely on cookbooks or family members to find a recipe. The proliferation of easily available recipes for almost any food imaginable was only possible due to the the lightning-fast sharing we can do via social media and email. Now we are deluged with recipes, but is that necessarily a good thing? The Telegraph takes a look at whether more is better when it comes to recipes. 

Pre-internet, food writers had to travel extensively to find recipes from cultures outside their own. A few adventuresome sorts like Claudia Roden, Diana Kennedy, and Paula Wolfert brought the foods of the world into our homes for the first time. Now, even the most exotic recipe is only a click away. This paradigm shift has changed the ways restaurant chefs operate. The theme at a recent international conference explained the concept that now “food is an open source” rather than a mystery that should be closely guarded. Chefs, who were notoriously stingy with recipe sharing in the past, are no longer judged by their “secret recipes” but instead by how often their food is photographed and passed on through Instagram. 

The explosion of recipes can also make food writers more accountable, argues Fuchsia Dunlop. She says that today readers can “hold writers to account” as to the authenticity of their recipes. A few Google searches can verify if the ingredients or methods jibe with a particular culture. 

As much as the digital recipe revolution has added to our culinary experience, there are downsides to the overwhelming number of recipes that are just a click away. The quality varies widely, and if a novice cook tries a mediocre version of a dish and is disappointed in the results, he or she might be discouraged from trying again. Author Diana Henry voices another concern about food on the internet. She find that many digital recipes “lack personality”, because they don’t have any context. “I am not interested in recipes that don’t come from somewhere,” she says. Henry likens a good recipe to “the capturing of perfume”, an essence of a particular time and place or memory.