I Just Need to Know How Long to Bake It

You look up a recipe because you need one piece of information: How long does this go in the oven?

The page has other plans.

First comes the cookie notice. Fair enough. Then a box asks if you’d like recipes sent to your inbox. Not right now. Another box wants you to sign up for updates. Still no. Somewhere behind all this is a picture of the finished dish, which is nice, but the dish in question hasn’t even made it into your oven yet.

All you wanted was a number followed by the word “minutes.” The website has made you the acting manager of its correspondence.

Scroll down and you may get an introduction, some notes on ingredients, suggestions for substitutions, and a helpful explanation of why this recipe is easy to make. Good. Then it should be easy to tell me when to take it out.

I understand why recipe sites have ads. Somebody wrote the recipe, took the pictures, and put it online for free. That work deserves something in return. I’m not demanding that strangers cook dinner for me and pay the hosting bill too.

But there’s a strange point where a page designed to help you cook begins requiring your full attention just to locate the cooking instructions. It’s a recipe behaving like the recipe is a spoiler.

Some pages offer a “Jump to Recipe” button, which is useful and also a quiet admission that the recipe is far enough away to require transportation. You tap it, land near the recipe card, and start looking for the temperature. Then your phone screen goes dark because you’ve been reading instead of touching it. Sensible behavior from a phone, less helpful when your hands are covered in flour.

There’s a special kind of optimism involved in using a recipe on a phone. You prop it against a jar, wake the screen with one clean knuckle, and try to keep an ad from taking up the space where the ingredient amounts were. The phone can guide a spacecraft across the planet. Right now you’re asking it to leave “one teaspoon” visible long enough to find a teaspoon.

A cookbook had its own problems. It could close itself while you were measuring something. It could get sauce on it. But once you found the page, it usually stayed on the page. It didn’t ask if you wanted weekly updates from the cookbook.

The recipe card finally appears. Ingredients, temperature, baking time. Everything you came for, laid out clearly. It even says “Prep time: 10 minutes.”

That starts after you find it.