In a satirical post for the now-defunct website The Toast, writer Daniel Mallory Ortberg once cataloged “All the Comments on Every Recipe Blog.” The results are funny, but also an accurate taxonomy of the species that populate the internet’s open spaces, food-related or not: the user error attributed to the original author (“I didn’t have any eggs, so I replaced them with a banana-chia-flaxseed pulse. It turned out terrible; this recipe is terrible”). The total non sequitur (“[600-word description of what they ate today] so this will make a great addition!”). The public shaming (“If you use olive oil for any recipe that’s cooked over 450°F, the oil will denature and you will get cancer. This post is irresponsible”). Small wonder, then, that comment sections—designated areas for free-flowing discussion and principled debate—have become notorious for being anything but. Whether the topic at hand is border walls or beef bourguignonne, the tragedy of the commons is the same.
There is, however, at least one exception to this otherwise ironclad rule. While I generally go out of my way to avoid comments (including and especially on my own work) like the plague, one form of crowdsourced feedback has become an attraction rather than a repellent—as much of an attraction, even, as the original content it’s attached to. The posts attached to the recipes on The New York Times’ stand-alone Cooking site are everything the archetypal internet comment is not. Held up against Ortberg’s fictional-but-also-too-real responses, Cooking’s are genuinely additive, have a ready-made takeaway, and best of all, inspire downright bonhomie toward my fellow man.
This might be because Cooking’s comments aren’t comments at all—they’re notes, a distinction Times food editor Sam Sifton emphasizes several times over the course of our conversation. “We made the conscious decision not to call them comments,” Sifton tells me. “The call to action was to leave a note on the recipe that helps make it better. That’s very different from ‘Leave a comment on a recipe.’ And the comment might be ‘I hate you.’ ‘You’re an asshole.’ ‘This is bad.’ And that’s helpful to no one. I see that on other recipes, and I’m glad that we don’t have those comments, because we don’t have comments. We have notes.”
Occasionally, the stray Cooking note has crossed over into the culture at large. A woman named Sydne Newberry infamously used Katharine Hepburn’s brownies to share a scandalous tale of infidelity and betrayal; the introduction to Craig Claiborne’s parsleyed noodles became the unlikely fodder for a widely circulated meme. But what truly makes Cooking such an oasis is much more mundane. Scroll down on any given Cooking page and you’ll find scores of testimonials from people who’ve already conducted the kitchen experiment you’re currently mulling over, offering their experience for your own culinary benefit. Thanks to the Cooking community, when attempting to replicate a beloved Chinese restaurant’s signature dish, I skipped the laborious deep-frying step, opting instead for a much less messy stint in the oven. I’ve made substitutions for certain hard-to-find ingredients and taken a leap on a flavor combination that initially raised an eyebrow. No other comment section has made any tangible improvement to my life, let alone several. And if the 456 notes—and counting!—on a simple chocolate-chip cookie recipe are any indication, I’m hardly alone.
“We don’t have, and I hope we never will have, some of the issues that plague the comments sections of news sites, where people are displaying vituperative language about race or gender. Or anything, for that matter,” Sifton says with obvious pride. “That’s just not showing up in our world, and I hope it never does.” Sifton calls the admittedly small distinction between comments and notes “the primed pump of civility [that] allowed those notes to become what they are now, which is not without humor and not without vitriol, but generally civil and decent, and most of all, helpful.”
In addition to heading the paper’s food coverage, Sifton oversaw the development and launch of Cooking as a separate website in 2014 and then paid-subscription product in 2017, a process that required something of a new skill set from the longtime newspaper writer and former restaurant critic. (“I’m just a reporter and editor who got roped into a startup lifestyle,” he says.) But as Cooking has grown to more than 120,000 paying subscribers—not including freeloading millennials like myself bumming off their parents’ accounts—in almost two years, the thinking behind the notes section remains as simple as it is democratic. “It’s my contention that there are only, like, 11 recipes in the world anyway,” he says. “Everything is a derivative of something else, and there are always ways of improving, or changing, or tweaking, or subbing out ingredients in any given recipe. The notes column is a great place to record that, either for yourself or the community at large.”
Thousands of readers have taken Sifton up on this invitation, which he often reiterates in his regular newsletters. They include Alexandra, a home cook based in New York City who frequently consults and contributes recipe notes. (Alexandra asked that her last name be withheld to preserve her anonymity.) “I find the comments to be one of the most helpful parts of the product because they’re real people who have actually tried making these things in their real homes, as opposed to test kitchens,” she wrote me over email. Alexandra, who is lactose intolerant, frequently looks for workable dairy substitutions and pays it forward by sharing some of her own. “Honestly, it’s gotten to the point that I don’t start a recipe without reading the comments first. They’ll tell me if I can skip something, if something doesn’t make sense, if I should do something different, all that.”
While the Cooking community has largely internalized the site’s pragmatic ethos, its maintenance does require some enforcement. Notes are “meant to serve as a resource for the readers,” senior staff editor Margaux Laskey says. “Which is why we’re so adamant about keeping them relevant, and why we don’t allow comments or notes from readers that appear as if they haven’t made the recipe.” To make it onto the site, a note has to have some trace of real-world insight, or at the very least pose a question with an eye toward applying potential answers in the kitchen. What it can’t be is a geyser of pure, unadulterated opinion—in other words, the lifeblood of the traditional comment section. “We don’t leave up the heated, all-caps comments that don’t have anything useful to add,” Laskey explains. “Because we’ve heard from readers they don’t like that. They have to sift through all these useless notes to find the tips and the way people modify recipes.”
On the internet, moderation is something of a dying art, often outsourced, automated, or even discontinued altogether by resource-strained news outlets. At Cooking, however, every single note is approved or rejected by an actual human being. More often than not, that human being is Aidan Gardiner, a moderator with the Times’ community desk who works on both Cooking and straightforward news stories. It’s a position that makes him uniquely qualified to observe the differences between the two audiences. “You go over to the latest story out of Washington, and you can get commenters who have a particular issue that’s in the national discourse they just want to wax on for a little bit,” Gardiner says. “There’s a little more leeway in the other sections to talk about what you want to talk about and react the way you want to react. Whereas Cooking is a little more constrained and trying to help your fellow reader a little bit more.” Keeping recipe notes rigorously on topic keeps the discussions there from veering off the rails, even when off-kilter submissions have a certain, tempting charm. One of Gardiner’s favorite Cooking regulars consistently submits notes under the username “Egg?,” with the attached note reading simply, “Egg.” Unfortunately, he’s obligated to turn them down. An egg may be harmless, but it’s not teaching anyone how to perfect their frittata, either.
Beyond their tone, Cooking notes are conspicuously lacking in other hallmarks of online discourse. Virtually every comment section has its MVPs—the power users whose frequency and volume tend to set the tone for everyone else, for better or for worse. Despite occasional standouts like Newberry, however, the spirit of Cooking is more evenly distributed. “I don’t think we have yet found one or two people who spend their days writing notes on the recipes, in the way that, on the Times core site, there are some people who seem to spend their waking hours writing comments on news articles. Or limericks, or whatever,” Sifton says. Alexandra, for her part, thinks the design of Cooking, which has no full-fledged user profiles in the vein of a proper social network, encourages less self-aggrandizement and more actual assistance. “It’s kind of more like message boards,” she writes. “Like-minded people talking about a focused thing. You’re not trying to build a brand/profile since it doesn’t function that way, technically. It’s just folks tryna help other folks.”
Cooking’s lack of celebrities and surplus of regular home cooks account for its charm as well as its practicality. “It does seem like these are just everyday folks from all walks of life, all parts of the world, just doing what they’re doing. It’s everybody. Some of my favorite comments are just ‘Barb liked this.’ Period,” Gardiner says, laughing. “I have no idea who Barb is, but clearly to whatever reader that was, Barb was an important person in their opinion about this particular recipe and its merit to them, so they wanted to make a note of that.” Cooking allows for private notes only visible to the reader, but it also allows for telling glimpses into users’ routines: the picky child who asked for a substitution, or the spouse who appreciated an over-the-top birthday meal.
Notes are primarily intended as a way for readers to communicate with other readers. But they’re also constructive enough that they’ve become what reader input almost never is: a two-way street. “I’m unbiased, because I contribute to both, but more people, I think, are cooking New York Times recipes than Bon Appétit recipes,” says Alison Roman, a columnist at both publications and author of the bestselling cookbook Dining In. Roman’s viral recipe for chickpea stew is one of the most popular, and therefore one of the most annotated, posts on Cooking. “Cooking is so subjective, and people just love to weigh in and give their two cents,” Roman says, laughing. Still, all the adjustments feel more like flattery than implicit criticism: “I think there’s always room for improvement, and there’s always room for tweaks and modifications and to evolve something. That’s what cooking is.” Per some stew notes, I’ve braised kale for longer and used slightly less liquid than the original recipe calls for, to delicious effect. Experience gives Cooking notes slightly more weight than the chorus of “this looks good” and “I don’t like fennel” that crop up on less strictly monitored sites—not just to other recipe followers, but also recipe writers.
Sometimes, notes act like watchdogs, flagging typos or inconsistencies for editors to swiftly correct. “When we built Cooking, it ported over all the recipes from like, 1983 onward that were on the NYT core website, and they basically dumped them into this database,” Laskey recalls. “So we have tons of recipes, some of them really old, and we’re not regularly looking at them. But readers will discover them and notice that there’s something off. They’ll be like, ‘Is this really one-eighteenth of a cup?’ And we’ll be like, ‘No, it’s not really one-eighteenth of a cup!’ So we need to go in and adjust that on the back end so it renders appropriately on the front.” With a recipe count in the literal tens of thousands, Cooking boasts an archive far too large to fact-check in its entirety. Thanks to amateur volunteers, however, its staff can get much closer than they would on their own.
More often, though, they simply highlight where a recipe leaves room for clarification or interpretation. “I find them a very useful tool,” says Melissa Clark, the Times food writer and cookbook author who represents one of Cooking’s most prolific bylines. In the past, notes have alerted Clark to an Instant Pot recipe developed with an older model that triggered the burn warning on relatively sensitive newer ones, and bottled orange juice leading to unrisen loaves of orange-olive-oil challah. Clark adjusted the recipes accordingly, while also keeping the reader feedback in mind for future projects. “It changes the way I write recipes,” she says. “I’m much more in tune to what gives people problems and language that is simple.” According to Sifton, Cooking’s ethos of foregrounding the reader’s experience verges on civic obligation. “We really do believe that we are—the whole group of us who produce NYT Cooking every day—we feel that we’re in service to a community,” he says. “We’re helping to make people understand their cooking world a little bit better and to make their lives a little more delicious and a little easier, as well.”
The combination of Cooking’s mindful design, careful maintenance, and enthusiastic participation fosters an unusual sense of trust. Which is exactly what’s missing from the rest of the internet and what Cooking provides in spades: trust that the sentence you’re reading was penned by a real person, not a Russian bot; trust that the person means what they’re saying, not trying to get a rise for the nihilistic fun of it; trust that a suggestion shouldn’t be brushed off as a matter of course. “It just makes me a better recipe writer in general,” Clark says. Hours after we spoke, I made one of my favorite Clark creations, a quick-and-easy chicken concoction with garlic and anchovies. It’s a near-perfect weeknight dinner, with one slight adjustment: I waited to add the cloves until right before the pan went in the oven, just like the notes said I should.
