Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.
The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.
Book recipes have a different problem that they need to fill 100 or so pages of content and most authors have maybe 3-5 good recipes. So you get a ton of filler as well
See there is a double edged sword here because outstanding recipes are thesis papers explaining the motivation, concepts, prior art and research, history, experiments, methodology, equipment, and then finally, optionally even, the reipce. They should be long and verbose. You should learn something by reading a recipe.
The problem of course is that search crawlers can't tell the difference between between the two and so long but empty content is treated the same.
Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.
The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.