A Lot of Us Want Inexpensive, Easy Home-Cooked Meals

Slate’s analysis of the most popular Allrecipes reveals what many home cooks value.

I’ve shared a lot of the real, actual food I eat with Team Billfold, and if you’ve been paying attention to the recipes you can probably get a decent idea of what I value, food-wise:

1. I like cooking, at least to the point where I prefer it to pre-prepared meals.
2. I don’t like cooking that is too complicated, too time-consuming, or requires too many ingredients. I’ve often described my cooking technique as “stacking foods on top of each other.”
3. I appreciate foods that can be made in bulk and frozen. (I have leftover taco shells, as well as three portions of baked beans and cornbread, in the freezer right now.)
4. I factor health/nutrition into my cooking decisions and eat my fruits and vegetables (especially at lunch, which includes a lot of pre-cut lettuce salads and whole fruit), but I also give myself a huge health bonus simply for cooking at home instead of buying prepared meals or ordering takeout. That cheese-covered casserole is healthy because it’s mostly baked beans, and it’s also healthy because it isn’t a delivery pizza.

Which means I loved Slate’s new article on Allrecipes, the crowdsourced recipe site that theoretically represents “what Americans actually cook.”

Allrecipes Reveals the Enormous Gap Between Foodie Culture and What Americans Actually Cook

I don’t like Slate’s use of the word “Americans,” as if the entire country were preheating its ovens to 350 degrees at the same time. (There’s an implied “white” in front of that “Americans,” which holds up when you look at the people leaving reviews on Allrecipes; nearly all white, nearly all women, cooking for both couples and families.) But okay, apparently they’ve got search results to prove a lot of us are looking up these recipes:

Allrecipes is the most popular English-language food website in the world. According to ComScore, last December the site got almost 50 million visits, the biggest month by any food site ever.

So what do those of us who visit Allrecipes value? Quick, cheap meals that don’t take a lot of work to put together.

To work your way through the Allrecipes hall of fame, Julie & Julia–style, is to be confronted with an obvious truth: Most people are far more concerned with convenience and affordability than authenticity or novelty. “Baked Ziti I” calls for sour cream in place of ricotta and makes a totally respectable casserole. To make “Zesty Slow Cooker Chicken Barbecue,” all I had to do was throw a few chicken breasts into a slow cooker along with half a bottle of barbecue sauce, a little brown sugar, and some Italian dressing.

If I were making chicken barbecue in the slow cooker, I’d skip the brown sugar—which I don’t have in my kitchen, and which is probably already an ingredient in the barbecue sauce—and the half-cup of Italian dressing, which I do have but would add 720 extra calories to the dish (or roughly 180 calories per portion). Essentially, I’d take that quick, cheap meal and make it even quicker and cheaper—and, in theory, “healthier.”

I appreciate the idea that I’m not the only one looking for a good way to dump a can of sauce over a few chicken breasts, or pile some kind of cheese and breading over a casserole. I don’t appreciate the idea that this type of cooking is, as Slate puts it, “out-of-date.”

Slate writes “If “Awesome Broccoli-Cheese Casserole” tastes like a dish from the past, then that’s because it is,” but I’m not sure that’s true—and I’m not even sure what “from the past” means. I know it’s supposed to mean “what our mothers and grandmothers made, if we come from a white, middle-class food culture,” and I guess we’re supposed to be more evolved cooks than they were, with their Jiffy cornbread and their cans of beans, but nobody ever says “ham sandwiches taste like a dish from the past,” even though they serve pretty much the same function: to stack cheap, filling, reasonably nutritious foods on top of each other and quickly get a meal on the table.

Which is what a lot of us are still doing, and which we need to do three times a day, every day, for the majority of our adult lives. If I can solve that problem with casseroles and slow-cooker meals and Taco Night, I will absolutely add those recipes into my repertoire—no matter how outdated someone claims they’ve become.

After all, millions of Allrecipe users are doing the same thing.

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