Apple's HomeView Shows Recipes Without the Web Page Around Them

Apple introduced its new smart display, HomeView, with a three-minute video about a busy family of five. In it, the screen sits on a kitchen table and helps the family check calendars, send messages and open a French toast recipe with simple, step-by-step instructions.

HomeView follows other websites, browser add-ons and smart gadgets that promise to shrink an online recipe to its basics. Instead of scrolling down a long page to find the recipe at the bottom, you get the ingredient list, the cooking steps and timers. You can move through them hands-free using your voice and Siri AI.

For people who cook, that is handy. For people who write recipes, it can be a problem. The Verge's writer, who also shares recipes in a food newsletter, explains that recipes may be free to read but they are not free to create. Ads and affiliate links (links that earn a small payment if a reader buys something) help writers earn money from their work. When a tool strips a recipe down, those ads and links disappear.

Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at the food site Eater, said tools that only pull out the recipe break an unspoken agreement between recipe creators and their readers.

Online recipes come from many places. Large sites such as Allrecipes and NYT Cooking each host tens of thousands of them. Food magazines publish their own, and independent cooks share recipes on blogs, newsletters, YouTube and TikTok.

The long stories that appear above many recipes exist for a reason, The Verge's writer says. That writing is typically the one piece of a recipe a writer can hold a copyright on, because the rest counts as instructions. Makalintal added that recipe writers had to lengthen their text so their recipes would have a better chance of appearing in Google searches.

There is some good news for writers. To put a recipe on HomeView, a person first has to open it on an iPhone or in Safari on HomeView itself, so the original page and its ads are seen at least once. Still, that is worth less to a website than a reader who scrolls through the page while cooking.