there were comparatively few other resources for finding recipes
online. It's hard to imagine John Chandler's "World's Best Lasagna"
doing quite so well if it were uploaded now, to a busier and more
cynical Internet.

In 2006, Allrecipes sold to Reader's Digest, and within a couple of
years all the original co-owners had left. Six years later,
Allrecipes sold to Meredith (now Dotdash Meredith), the media group
that owns Food & Wine, The Spruce Eats, Serious Eats, and EatingWell.
In the years since, the site has taken on the mannerisms of
establishment food media, in which editorial content is pushed to the
fore. Go on Allrecipes today and you will see a selection of
highlighted user recipes, but also more carefully vetted pieces such
as "Chef John's Best Recipes for When Summer Tomatoes Are at Their
Peak" and "8 Essential Tips for Summer Hosting (and Actually Enjoying Yourself)."

The old, more chaotic Allrecipes survives in the archives, but is
increasingly hard to find. Of the hundred and thirteen thousand
recipes on the site, some fifty-five thousand are actually accessible
by search. Many older recipes have been suppressed, and new ones now
undergo a more rigorous vetting process. "The submissions go into a
queue that our editorial team reviews for publication," Molly Fergus,
the site's senior vice-president and associate group general manager,
told me via e-mail. "Recipes are only searchable on site (or on
Google) once they are accepted and edited by our recipe team." In
some ways, it's a more reliable site now--curation means that the test-kitchen-approved recipes tend to rise to the top of the search
page, and those with bad reviews can be found and reëvaluated by the
editorial teams. Yet it feels less like a place for home cooks to
gather and experiment than it used to. And certain tools that Hunt
put in place in the early days--searching by multiple ingredients,
scaling recipes up or down--are gone. Carnes told me that she's had
recipes languish in the backlog for years. In striving to
professionalize itself, the site has lost the often troublesome
entropy that once made it so fun.

Tim Hunt left Allrecipes shortly after the sale to Reader's Digest,
and hasn't used it as much since then, except for cookie recipes. He
hardly cooked when he first engineered the site, but he's now a
proper culinary nerd, smoking chiles and making his own cider vinegar
from the fruits of an Asian-pear tree in his garden. On the phone, he
enthused about the chef Derek Sarno--"a vegan, but not a fascist
vegan"--and told me about a Sarno-inspired sandwich he'd recently
made for dinner, with blocks of fried, spiced tofu and really good
barbecue sauce. Hunt also grows buckwheat, a favorite ingredient of
mine, and after we hung up we exchanged recipes: he sent a link for
buckwheat crinkle cookies that he and his wife make each Christmas; I
sent a recipe for buckwheat shortbread in return.

At its best, this is how Allrecipes worked--as a kind of culinary
hive mind, a place that understood that the only thing people like
more than making recipes is comparing them. (My buckwheat shortbread
was caught up in the purgatorial Allrecipes queue for a few months,
but is now finally online.) One of Cindy Carnes's most treasured
contributions is called Mary's Meatballs, named for a nurse Carnes
worked with in the nineties. You take a jar of chili sauce, a cup of
brown sugar, a sixteen-ounce can of whole cranberries, and a can of
sauerkraut, put it all in a pan, and heat over a gentle flame. Once
it's simmering, you pour it over three pounds of meatballs, and bake
for an hour in an oven at three hundred and fifty degrees. "She
brought those all the time to everything, every potluck and
everything at the hospital," Carnes told me. People seemed to love
them. Mary handed over the recipe after she was diagnosed as having
terminal breast cancer. "She said, 'Please make my meatballs. And
remember me.'" She died in 1995.

Right now, Carnes is in the middle of putting together a family
cookbook, using an old collection of her aunt's as a scaffold for her
own additions--clipped from copies of Taste of Home, printed out from Allrecipes, or kept on a scrap of paper, then painstakingly typed up.
So far, she's collected more than a thousand entries; Mary's
Meatballs is among them. Now she's got to find a way to actually
print and share the volume with her family. If only there were a
place for all this--a forum big and lawless enough to host several
generations' worth of eclectic culinary lore. "Well," she said with a
sigh. "That's the bugaboo."

From: <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/ allrecipes-americas-most-unruly-cooking-web-site>
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