Recipes have never been easier to find. No need to dig through cookbooks, magazines or newspapers. You just type a name — or even just a couple of ingredients — into a search engine and you’ve got dozens of choices at your fingertips.
But how do you know they’ll really work? At the same time the number of available recipes has gone through the ceiling, their reliability has gone into the basement. Recipe testing is becoming a lost art.
Cookbook publishers trust their authors to do the recipe testing, but with cookbook advances declining to next to nothing, few writers can afford to hire independent testers to make sure the recipes really work.