On a recipe for spicy butternut squash pasta with spinach, posted by the New York Times in October of last year, a commenter did not mince their words. “This recipe turned out horribly,” they wrote. “The timing was incorrect and the spice quantities questionable. Honestly why throw jalapeno rounds on top of red pepper flakes (and I like spice) without rounding it out with other flavors? Wish I had gone curry… but with that profile the cheese flavors don’t mix and you’d have to sub in something more appropriate. The result, compound by two competing Presidential town halls, has basically sprained my marriage.”
As I scrolled idly through the recipe comments, wondering what to do with an impulse-purchased butternut squash, that final sentence stopped me in my tracks. The recipe’s flavours, according to this commenter, had not only been wrong, but had apparently contributed to a “sprained marriage”. This figuration of a relationship –not broken, but bent badly out of joint – was strangely charming. It was also poignant: one wondered, after all, what had gone on with the duelling presidential town halls? Was the marriage able to recover from the squash-bake-gate? It was a compelling story, one without an ending, just a fragment of someone else’s life that was caught in the mix of a complaint about flavours.
Over the past few months, I have been lurking increasingly in the comments sections on recipes and coming on stories like these. Comments sections, like much of the social internet, can be explosively hostile, especially when only lightly moderated or left to run their course. This hostility can and does spill over into recipe comments, of course. Fights break out over whether recipes are culturally appropriative, the ethics of eating animals and, of course, whether another commenter has followed the recipe. Like the rest of the world of food and cooking, recipe comments are not a sacrosanct space apart from or above the fray, and nor should they be.
But I am interested in the way in which these spaces form a kind of makeshift, loose community, one that reminds me more of the early internet than social media. Recipe commenters are a group of people, most of whom have followed the same set of instructions and then returned to report on their results, to ask questions and to opine on the experience. Unlike social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which can feel like millions of strangers posting into a contextless void, having millions of separate conversations that occasionally overlap, recipe comment sections confer a built-in common interest, at the very least, in pursuing the same cooking project.
As such, recipe comments are often practical: this requires much more salt. Miso makes a good vegan substitute for anchovies. Will it still taste good without the parsley? In providing verdicts on the recipe itself, commenters are often brutally honest: “Even the look was unappealing – was embarrassed just serving the family,” someone wrote, on a recipe for chicken tetrazinni. And they are also often heartwarming, as on a recent Rachel Roddy recipe for roast pumpkin, mushroom and chestnut pie published in the Guardian:
“What a lovely expression, ‘keep expectations flexible’. Yesterday my sister and I were discussing any memory of the quality of what we ate at Christmas as children. We concluded that we probably didn’t assess the quality, the meals simply needed to have the expected components. I also love the ‘at some point’ aspect of this article. My younger sister and I long ago latched onto the ‘do what happens next’ aspect of flexible family life. Our plans are practically never etched in tablets of stone. This pie looks delicious and we have everything bar the ricotta which didn’t figure on today’s amazing Christmas slot delivery. We do have plenty of suitable substitutes though and I really fancy having this at some point in the ‘12 days’.”
I originally came to reading recipe comments in large part for their use value. But now I also find myself scanning them for something else – the glimmers of the personal, perhaps, the funny and sometimes snarky voices of the commenters and the running conversations. On a recent set of Yotam Ottolenghi recipes, one commenter wrote that he was looking forward to making it but had sliced his thumb while cooking on New Year’s Eve; another responded, “Oh Thomas. I hope the thumb isn’t too bad” and recommended a pair of cooking gloves. Elsewhere, on Rachel Roddy’s recipe for rice and cabbage soup, someone wrote: “Lovely food but I am depressed that anyone might need a recipe to produce this. Surely anyone with any feeling for food as something that nourishes the body and soul should be able to put this together without being told how to do it?” This inspired a lengthy thread on the value of recipes, even for the simplest of foods.
The recipe comments function like a virtual watering hole where strangers swap tips and stories and occasionally the stray insight. (On a stuffing recipe, someone wrote, cryptically: “People threaten revolt all the time, but it never really happens.”) There are even, occasionally, missed connections. On the same squash pasta recipe where one commenter complained of bad flavours and marriage troubles, someone else wrote, poignantly, “I added a carrot to the squash for more color and I wish I had a family to which I could serve this.” The next day, a few comments down, someone wrote, “Where do you live? I’ll swing by for a to-go order.” It seems improbable that these commenters – stymied by a lack of direct “reply” function, perhaps, and also by the fact of being two strangers on the internet likely many miles apart – were able to meet, in the end, over butternut squash pasta with spinach. But there is something moving in imagining that meeting, and seeing strange sparks of possibility that can still exist in digital communities – and in the comments.
Sophie Haigney writes about technology and culture for the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Atlantic