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by prawn 1609 days ago
I have dozens of cookbooks. Almost every single one is absolutely packed with personal details about the chef and background information on the recipe (who taught them the recipe, their beloved Nanna's method, the history of nut x in remote tribal desert y, etc).

I've been to cooking schools in multiple countries. All have gone into detail about the background of the chef and each recipe.

Same with restaurants. Many restaurants and certainly almost every fine-dining restaurant pushes the profile of the head chef.

1 comments

I can't help that you paid God knows how much extra for this unnecessary fluff. If I were to get any of those, I'd look around for the least extraneous-fluff-y offer I could find. :-)

More seriously: At least the classes and restaurants already push that stuff in their marketing, don't they? So I get all that already doing my comparison shopping, and therefore would probably actually (at least to some extent) resent the time wasted on repeating it. And the few cookboks I (or we, my wife and I) have are also of the matter-of-fact, recipes and nothing more, kind... I am probably just much less of a "foodie" than you. I think my preference pattern is the overwhelming majority.

Note that Clovegarden has "the history of nut x in remote tribal desert y, etc" too -- but on pages separate from the recipes. (As I recall Mr Grygus started the site in preparation for starting a business of selling foodie stuff online after winding up his computing and automation consultancy business -- but that still seems to linger on, and he is nearing [or, probably, well past?] normal retiring age, so I don't know if that new business will ever materialise. But as long as he is up to updating Clovegarden every now and then it remains my favourite site for food-related stuff.)

[Edit: Ttypo.]