recipe

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A recipe is special kind of post, that typically has a name, like an articles, a list of ingredients, and a list of instructions for making something, usually food or drink.

Why

Consider posting recipes for food or drink that you personally enjoy making & consuming, especially recipes you come up, so others may also enjoy making & consuming said food or drink.

How

How to publish

In your recipe, provide a short summary description, and then a clear minimal list of ingredients and brief list of instructions, for easy reference for someone following the recipe.

Additionally, consider describing variants you’ve tried or made, and how you personally relate to the recipe.

How to mark up

Mark up your recipe posts with h-recipe.

• If your recipe has a name use "p-name" for it.

Consider marking up your recipe also with the classic hRecipe since a few consuming applications (like Paprika) and services (like Google Recipe Search) still use it.

DO NOT enclose it in an h-entry - there is no need to do so.

If you want to separately post a note about creating or using the recipe on a particular day, then that makes sense as a separate h-entry post that would/could then link to the recipe on its own permalink.

IndieWeb Examples

Marked up as h-recipe.

Shane Becker

Shane Becker had posted at least one recipe on his site as an article, since 2005-03-30.

• https://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2005/03/30/my-bomb-ass-curry-recipe

Eli Duke

Eli Duke has been publishing recipes marked up as h-recipe since 2014-04-22 (git repo for the previous code base of his site, new code base is in a private repo).

• http://www.eliduke.com/recipes/hummus
• http://www.eliduke.com/recipes/vegan-mac-and-cheese
• http://www.eliduke.com/recipes/kale-salad
• http://www.eliduke.com/recipes/wacky-cake

Details:

• h-recipe markup only (no enclosing h-entry)

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki had been informally posting recipes as notes since 2014-01-27 but none of them included any explicit h-recipe markup. As of 2017-01-22 they have been converted to h-recipe markup!

• https://aaronparecki.com/recipes all recipes
• https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2014/01/27/1/cookie name, photo, ingredients, instructions, notes
• https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2015/02/19/2/cocktail-recipe cocktail recipe with name and ingredients
• https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2015/06/06/1/recipe name, ingredients, instructions. was POSSEd to Facebook as a note, so also has comments

Details:

• h-recipe and hRecipe markup only (no enclosing h-entry), e.g. 2017-07-30 recipe

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill has posted recipes as of 2017-04-14

• https://gregorlove.com/2017/04/crock-pot-white-chicken-chili/

Details:

• h-recipe markup only (no enclosing h-entry)

Jonathan LaCour

Jonathan LaCour has been publishing recipes on his site since 2015-08-14, marked up with mf2 as h-recipe. Jonathan created the plugin for publishing h-recipes for Known.

Anthony Ciccarello

Anthony Ciccarello Has a section for recipes he's made since 2021-01-12. Currently marked up as both h-recipe and hRecipe due to more widespread support, especially with search engines. Uses tags to group by meal. Optional support for using Cooklang formatting to write recipes. Would like to add usability improvements like scaling ingredients and sorting by time.

• https://www.ciccarello.me/recipes/

capjamesg

capjamesg has published coffee recipes marked up with h-recipe microformats on coffeerecipes.co, a coffee recipe site he runs, and on his personal website. Personal website example:

• https://jamesg.blog/2020/10/01/aeropress-recipe/

hRecipe Examples

Examples of recipe posts with only classic hRecipe markup.

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich has been publishing recipes marked up with mf1 as hrecipe since 7/4/15 and mf2 as h-recipe since 7-20-16. Incidentally as of July 2016, WordPress (via JetPack) supports a recipe shortcode which automatically adds sparse mf1 markup. Chris hopes to encourage them to additionally add mf2 markup as well. Those who'd like the modified JetPack code can find it here.

• Help out here:
  • Recipe shortcode: add additional microformats support (v1 and v2) #4470 - they’re open to a pull request!

• http://boffosocko.com/2015/07/04/cream-scones-recipe/
• http://boffosocko.com/2016/07/17/chili-prep-for-dinner-tonight/

Prototype Examples

These are examples of recipes as content being posted as other post types to the IndieWeb, but not marked up as h-recipe or hRecipe.

Kyle Mahan

Kyle Mahan has a secondary personal site where he posts recipes:

• http://hardly-starving.blogspot.com/

Past Examples

• ...

Silo Examples

Pinterest

Pinterest has supported parsing h-recipe to provide "rich pins" for recipes for quite some time (many years).

Perfect Company

The Perfect Company website publishes their recipes with h-recipe markup. Examples:

• cocktail recipe
• cookie recipe
• smoothie recipe

@cookbook

Maureen Evans has been posting recipes on twitter at @cookbook in a text picoformat.

Her abbreviations were previously documented in a Google Sheet embedded on a wiki but as of 2023-08-11, the spreadsheet appears to have been deleted. It could not be retrieved from the archived page either. If you have access to these abbreviations, please help update this section as they could be expanded to h-recipe.

Applications

Paprika

The Paprika Recipe Manager application parses classic hRecipe from the web.

Google Search

Google search recognizes hRecipe results, but requires schema.org markup to support "Guided Recipes" with Google Assistant

JustTheRecipe

https://www.justtherecipe.com/ parses the recipe on a page and shows it to users in a simplified format without ads.

Criticism

Extraneous content

Perhaps the top complaint about online recipes is the presence and length of content or ads on a recipe page that is beyond the ingredients, instructions, and other directly related information for a recipe.

There are quite a few openly posted complaints both about the common and heavy presence of such extraneous content, defense thereof by recipe authors and publishers, and some amount of contentious (social media drama) debate or exchanges of frustration between the two.

• Criticism of many (most?) recipes on the web: too much seemingly extraneous content to scroll past to actually get to the recipe: https://twitter.com/search?q=recipe%20scroll&src=typed_query&f=live
• ^ https://twitter.com/elonjames/status/1528779568827473920
  • "It’s 2022. I need online recipes to stop requiring me to read thru their 1800 word creative writing prompts for some ingredients.
    
    Every time:
    
    *googles Tuna Salad*
    
    *Clicks on Recipe*
    
    *Recipe loads*
    
    “It was a hot summer evening in Tuscany, the sky, crimson w/ hints of amber…”" @elonjames May 23, 2022
• ^ https://twitter.com/gordoooo_z/status/1529361076567023616
  • "This is satire right? Like I go into a recipe site expecting to scroll several pages to get to the recipe, but this is mayo. It takes (literally, like not the milennial literally that means the opposite) 25 seconds to make. I just wanted to remember the ratios." @gordoooo_z May 25, 2022
• ^ https://twitter.com/RealLindseyBean/status/1530660745767112706
  • "If I could just get a recipe online without having to scroll through your goddamn life story for 15 minutes that would be great" @RealLindseyBean May 28, 2022
• ^ https://twitter.com/MinaShikantaza/status/1530450425220018177
  • "Nobody In The History Of The Cooking:
    
    "I want to scroll down a recipe for four minutes or longer to get to the ingredients list!"" @MinaShikantaza May 28, 2022
• ^ https://twitter.com/joannanadin/status/1530090205830647808
  • "This one you have to scroll to the lower depths of hell to find the actual recipe but it’s worth it. https://cupfulofkale.com/vegan-double-chocolate-chip-cake-with-chocolate-frosting/" @joannanadin May 27, 2022
• More criticism about content before / instead of actual recipe ingredients & instructions: twitter.com/pupilindenial/status/1644430670582923265 (Internet Archive link, original deleted)
  • "someone please make an ad blocker that also blocks everything before the actual recipe" @pupilindenial April 7, 2023
• ^ tweet in reply to that: https://twitter.com/jefbrr/status/1644432676475244544
  • "For real though, if people use micro formats when they’re building the website, it would definitely be possible. https://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2#h-recipe" @jefbrr April 7, 2023
• ^ another reply to that deleted tweet: https://twitter.com/josieblackcat/status/1644434968708513792
  • "idk if it really works for every single one but https://www.justtherecipe.com" @josieblackcat April 7, 2023

Counter Arguments

• 2019-03-13 Helen Rosner: "A fun little sidebar to the (extremely justified) anger about that Epicurious job posting is that literally nobody on this hellsite seems to understand how most internet recipes actually get from a cook's head to your iphone screen" (archived from the original)
• 2020-12-14 Bridget Sellers: Why are food blog recipes so long? (archived from the original)
• 2022-05-25 @DawnLaurier: "It's always stressful to realize there are people who still don't know this: Recipe developers have to do it for SEO and must format to make readers scroll past ads, otherwise the work & ingredient costs aren't partially offset by that revenue" (archived)

See Also

• posts
• h-recipe
• Paprika
• Cooklang