JEFF GAUGER

The internet is the best recipe book ever – bigger and cheaper than any actual book, with seemingly infinite variations on recipes as simple as scrambled eggs and as complicated as spanakopita.

But online recipes have a problem.

Wordiness.

Take scrambled eggs, among the humblest dishes that humans (with hens’ help) ever created.

My web search turned up a recipe at pinchofyum.com for “Life Changing Soft Scrambled Eggs.” It typifies the problem. On my laptop, I had to click the “down page” key 13 times and scroll through 588 words before finding the actual recipe.

A recipe itself is seldom the problem. Pinchofyum’s scrambled-egg instructions filled a taut 179 words.

The problem is long, flowery preambles. They’re like mosquitos in a Louisiana swamp – everywhere and never welcome. Web sites inflict them to induce us to linger and as scaffolding for advertising.

But I just want to make scrambled eggs! Don’t make me hunt for the recipe under a load of fake nostalgia.

As problems go, wordy online recipes are way closer to peeve than pandemic. But even peeves deserve their rants.

Jeff Gauger is a former executive editor of The Shreveport Times who now teaches journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Send comments, anecdotes, suggestions and brickbats to jeff.gauger08@gmail.com.
 

THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE July 31 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.