[what_ever]

Pretty sure the long recipes are due to others not being able to copy them if you have long essay describing it or something?

[dragonwriter]

The essay is more protectible by copyright than the recipe itself, but including it doesn’t protect the recipe itself.

I actually think the issue is that the long essay provides more space to put advertising alongside or interrupting the flow.

[doctorpangloss]

I'm not sure why this particular idiosyncratic thing attracts so much mystery, but the answer is that there are long essays about the recipes because people like them.

[Tarball10]

I assumed the long essays were for SEO (inflates the amount of cooking-related keywords). Which would make it kind of ironic that another Google product is now stripping the SEO content back out.