Today's rejection

Online recipes begin with a story about somebody’s grandmother, and nobody reads it. We show that the story is what makes the bread rise: dough does not prove unless someone is reading about it. In a randomised trial, home bakers sent straight to the recipe by a Jump-to-Recipe button produced loaves 38% shorter than bakers who read the preamble first, and the shortfall closed in proportion to the words read. Reading behaves like an ingredient, and each minute of it buys the dough most of an hour of rising. This predicts a law of preamble length, 4.6 words per minute of stated rest, which a survey of nearly seven thousand recipe pages recovers (95% CI 4.3–4.8) after controlling for search-engine keywords. Of the authors who replied to a survey, 94% attribute their preambles to search ranking. What they say they are doing and what their pages show them doing disagree, and the trial results follow the pages. The effect is absent in focaccia, and we do not know why. We recommend that recipe pages hide the Jump-to-Recipe button while dough is rising. Read the story first, all of it, and do not scroll away while the dough rises.