Subin Yang
Before calling a recipe “leeky” or “lemony” was a joke, these descriptors were a revelation
It was the post on X that stopped food media in its tracks. On April 23, 2024, comedian Karli Marulli joked about offerings in the Cooking section of the New York Times, imagining the platonic recipe that comes up no matter what you’re making: “beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans.” The riffs kept coming in the comments, mentions of jammy eggs and brothy, garlicky stew, each “-y” twisting the knife. Perhaps at some future date we’ll declare that on that day in April, the trend of naming recipes with conversational adjectives officially died.
But how was it born? Lemony greens and garlicky beans are not to be found in the Joy of Cooking or any missives from Martha. It may seem like these colloquial descriptors burst forth from the forehead of the millennial internet, fully formed on Bon Appétit. But recipe naming is an act of scene setting, and from the moment recipes were codified into books and the pages of magazines, there has been the challenge of what to name them to lure the home cook. Too broad and the reader won’t know what they’re cooking, but too specific and you risk clunkily listing every ingredient in the title. Do you name a texture? One primary flavor or three? Nod to the country a recipe takes inspiration from? Convey authority or informality?
Before it was a joke, a descriptor like “leeky” was a revelation; casual yet informative, fun and inviting, a rebellion against the authoritative tone of recipes of the past. And its rise and fall reveals the changing ways home cooks want to think of themselves — and how recipe creators market to those ideas.
“I do sort of feel like I created a monster within that genre,” says Alison Roman. You were probably picturing her work when thinking about these conventions. She’s published recipes for “garlicky” carrots and sweet peppers, “lemony” white beans and trout dip, “brothy” chicken, chicken with “all the garlic,” and her famous shallot pasta (#ThePasta) was originally billed as “The Tomato-y, Shallot-y Pasta You Didn’t Know You Wanted.”
Roman says it was an uphill battle to get her editors at Bon Appétit, where she first began publishing recipes in 2012, to let her get loose with recipe names. You can see her earliest recipes for things like “Salted Pistachio Brittle” and “Mint Chip Ice Cream Cake” are named more straightforwardly, though she does get slightly more conversational with “The Ultimate Straight-Up Regular Kosher Dill Pickle Recipe.” Her goal was not just to be descriptive, but to get at the core of what makes the recipe special. “To me, ‘garlicky’ is the essence of garlic, it’s how you would describe something if somebody asked you what it tastes like,” she says.
me: what should i dooooo
nyt cooking: beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans
— Karli Marulli (@karlimarulli) April 23, 2024
The late aughts and early teens were a watershed moment for home cooking. Food Network had built a generation of not just viewers but fans, who saw shows like Good Eats and 30 Minute Meals as both education and entertainment. Top Chef premiered in 2006, showcasing the specific talents of restaurant chefs. The same year Michael Pollan published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, pushing readers to think about American foodways and where their ingredients come from. Cooking as entertainment, and as moral good, appeared to liberate it from gendered household labor (though of course, it didn’t actually). Cooking was now considered a hobby, something you could build a personality around, rather than something necessary to keep yourself and your family alive.
The boom in cooking television, as well as the birth of the internet’s food blogs, gave anyone looking for what to make for dinner almost infinite options. This meant that anyone naming recipes had to figure out what would attract someone looking for one. Melissa Clark, food columnist at the New York Times who has published recipes for garlicky chicken and pasta with garlicky breadcrumbs, says that when she began her column there in 2007, she started taking more liberties with the recipe titles. “You are already opening yourself up, and you’re already creating an intimate space. So it seemed natural to make the recipe titles more fun and a little more conversational,” she says.
But the dominant food-as-entertainment culture was still very chef-driven, which was reflected in recipe names. “When I started at Food52 in 2010, people were still using more articles and adjectives that might be considered redundant now, probably a reflection of fancier restaurant menus at the time,” says food writer and cookbook author Kristen Miglore, who gives the example of “something like Simple Summer Pork Chops with a Balsamic-Pepper Plum Reduction and Fresh Thyme,” a wordy title that intimidates more than it inspires.
The sense of familiarity that “lemony” adjectives and suffixes evoke was a rebellion to these restaurant-based naming conventions. “A lot of my creative decisions, especially early in my career, were made as a reaction to something that was happening,” says Roman. “I wasn’t really trying to make a point. I was just like, why can’t we use the word ‘frizzled’?” Instead of how you would speak to a customer or a subordinate, it’s how you would speak to a friend.
My copy of 1879’s Housekeeping in Old Virginia includes a recipe for “Common Pancakes” that includes no actual cooking instructions, just ingredient measurements, as well as a recipe for “Brunswick Stew” that only says to stew the ingredients together for “some time.” Like many early cookbooks, it was written for either a wife or household cook who already knew what she was doing. This was not about inspiring creativity. This was about getting dinner on the table.
Of course, home cooks (mostly women) have long swapped recipes and wanted to try new things, and as magazines and the women’s pages of the newspapers became more prevalent, they began printing recipes from staff, readers, and advertisers. These started out as straightforward as they had been when cookbooks were first published — a 1922 issue of Better Homes & Gardens has a whole section on cooking with currants, including Currant Catsup and Currant Dumplings — but soon it’s clear recipe developers wanted to catch readers’ eyes. By 1942, Gourmet was publishing recipes with mysterious titles like “Bachelor’s Defense” and “Eggs Obstaculos,” and in the 1950s Kraft was advertising in BHG with recipes like “Sassy Shrimp Mold.”
The recipes were also more detailed, inviting those who had never cooked before to try with foolproof instructions. Through magazines, and later television, the assumed audience welcomed not just women who were only ever expected to run a household, but also that most modern invention — a woman who didn’t know how to cook. Or, technically, anyone who didn’t know how to cook. As food television emerged as a genre, and took off with Food Network’s launch in 1993, the appeal was to entice the curious gourmets who felt both excited and intimidated by the mere presence of a professional chef on their screen. There began to be an emphasis on achievability, the idea that you, who never went to culinary school, could make this.
By the ’90s, the gourmet, by then called a “foodie,” was a whole class of people: people who sought out good, exciting restaurants and prided themselves on their knowledge of many cuisines. Part of the entertainment of food television was just watching a professional cook what they’d make in their restaurant kitchens. Here were the cheffy titles Migliore spoke of, things like Florida Lobster and Fresh Pappardelle with Tomatoes and Chives or Olive Oil Grape Cake with Honey-Ginger Glaze.
The cheffy names were also one solution to a secondary problem. By the time food television became more common, recipes were readily available — anyone wanting to make pancakes could find five different ways to do so in their mother’s cookbook collection. The recipes on television had to be different, unique to the show or chef. Viewers had to be able to master them, but more importantly, they had to stand out enough that they’d remember what they saw.
No one embodied the possibility of language on food television more than Rachael Ray. The cook and host of shows like 30 Minute Meals and $40 a Day created a whole lexicon to ensure her recipes and techniques stuck in viewers’ brains. In 2007, The Oxford American College Dictionary added the Ray-ism “EVOO” to its listings, and she invented phrases like “garbage bowl,” “entréetizer,” “stoup,” and “choup,” as well as punctuated her instructions with words like “delish” and “yum-o.” And her 2010 cookbook, Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats, includes more relaxed titles like eggs with “lemony” greens, and “about 15 minute soup.”
“So many things she said are burned into my brain,” says chef and cookbook author Sohla El-Waylly. Which was exactly the point. Ray may have been the immediate precursor to the internet-driven style of casual suffixes — these portmanteaus and silly adjectives make you remember her. “Making a great recipe is just one small part of it. Selling it is the bigger part,” says El-Waylly. Sure, Ray could have just called it a soup or a stew. But stoup, like lemony and beany and “all the garlic,” makes you remember. Especially if you’ve only heard it on TV or YouTube.
By the 2010s, magazines and blogs were publishing recipes online, and YouTube offered a new — pausable, instantly rewatchable — format by which to watch someone cook, which sites like Bon Appétit dove into. This is where the garlicky greens really thrived. There were material reasons why this sort of language proliferated. “With ever-more recipes and limited space in email subject lines and social media captions, word choices had to be more eye-grabbing and visceral to inspire clicks,” says Migliore. “We started seeing more garlicky, mustardy, honeyed, coconuttiest, crispety cruncheties, all of the ___.”
But this was also just the way millennials talked. “With video personalities becoming bigger drivers of recipe traffic, the language of the young and hip spilled over into recipe titles, making all the ‘reductions’ and ‘sesame-encrusted medallions’ of earlier generations seem fusty and impersonal,” says Migliore. “All of the garlic” sounds like a meme. These recipe titles signaled a new generation was at the helm of food media, one that was willing, like Rachael Ray, not to speak down but to.
“I think that we’re living in an age where people don’t want an expert to tell them what to do, they want a friend to tell them what to do,” says Clark. Descriptions of “brothy meatballs” and “Greek-ish chicken” of the 2010s made the recipes sound like someone casually walking you through what they do, not like you’re in culinary school. A generation raised on Food Network had turned out a number of people who loved the concept of cooking elaborate, flavorful meals, but perhaps had not grown up doing it themselves or had grown up cooking one cuisine and didn’t know how to incorporate new-to-them flavors. “We see people who are nervous. And so we want to take them by the hand and say, it’s okay,” says Clark.
The rejection of the authoritative tone, as well as a healthy fear of claiming expertise over cultures and cuisines one is not a part of, has also added to the hedging in recipe titles through more casual adjectives. Migliore mentions interviewing Samin Nosrat, who said her Persian-ish Rice with Tahdig “was insurance, so that people wouldn’t expect whatever their definition of authenticity was in her technique.” Priya Krishna says much the same in her introduction to her cookbook, Indian-ish, writing the recipes are “60 percent traditional Indian, 40 percent Indian-plus-something-else … but they all equally comprise our family’s unique culinary canon.” This is about the specificity of this cook’s point of view, not authority.
Like with any trend, however, it became impossible to escape, and then tipped over into cringe. For instance, the new Kismet cookbook titles a whole chapter “Salady” and another “Eggy + Meaty.” In More is More, Molly Baz has a recipe for “yummy dust,” and on her Instagram she titled a burger recipe “Caesar Boigaz,” later clarifying they were “wit chovies.” And, as Roman laments, the descriptors that were once meant to emphasize the essential flavors of a dish have been watered down. “I look at recipes and am like, you’re just finishing it with a squeeze of lemon, that’s not ‘lemony’,” says Roman. “So many people did bad things with those words.” Of course “garlicky” turned into a joke.
In July, Dan Pelosi published a recipe in the New York Times for “Spaghetti Sauce.” It doesn’t claim the heritage of marinara or Bolognese, nor specific flavors, nor Pelosi’s specific flair for indulgent ingredients. It doesn’t claim much of anything. This is perhaps the next wave of recipe names. Pelosi has published other recipes like Pasta Primavera and Angel Hair Pasta, the latter of which doesn’t even hint at a sauce. Eric Kim has a Chocolate Birthday Cake. Justine Doiron has Zucchini Risotto and Strawberry Shortcake. Even Alison Roman’s most recent recipes are things like Stovetop Jam and Baked Shells.
The names are definitive but not authoritative, casual in their straightforwardness. They are neither implying they’re the best baked shells or overloading you with flavor detail. Instead, they rely on the home cook to make some jumps. Part of this, says Clark, is an emphasis on SEO — unless you’re looking for a specific recipe, you’re probably not searching for “crispiest chicken thighs with garlicky greens.” Now that so much of recipe finding has moved online, a more straightforward name catches the most searchers. Miglore also notes there’s ever less space to grab someone’s attention, whether it’s in 20 seconds on TikTok or as someone is about to scroll past you on Instagram, so you need to “communicate so much in just a word or two.” She mentions popular recipes like Pizza Beans, Latke Cookies, Samosa-dillas, and Croffles that try to get at the heart of a recipe without any adjectives at all.
As with any trend, the time just comes for change. “It’s a little bit of decluttering,” says Clark. And after hundreds of years of printed recipes, we’ve landed close to the beginning, with recipe developers assuming a knowledge, or at least self-sufficiency, from home cooks. Think about it — you probably know exactly what “spaghetti sauce” means. And if you don’t, well, it includes six cloves of minced garlic. So it’s probably pretty garlicky.
Subin Yang is a freelance illustrator based in NYC and Seoul, South Korea.
