Sugar, Sex, and Very Little Sleep

Deb Perelman has kept Smitten Kitchen going through the rise and fall of blogging, the pivot to newsletters, and the looming specter of AI. She has no intention of stopping.

There is an agreed-upon bit of cooking wisdom that one should not test out a new recipe for a crowd. You should always make it at least once first, to make sure the recipe goes to plan and you don’t find yourself serving undercooked fish or burnt brownies. It’s advice Deb Perelman tries to adhere to. In her second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day, she writes that making anything new will typically “send you into a vibe-ruining tizzy.” 

But she then admits she breaks her own rule, because “cravings trump rationality pretty much always around here, and especially when I am six months pregnant.” She arrives at a party with a tomato and gigante bean bake, soon to be christened Pizza Beans. Of course, it was a hit; it was from Smitten Kitchen. Her recipes have, for the past 20 years, through a blog and three cookbooks, become things readers trust as the kind of recipes you can make any time, for anyone, without fear. 

The two things that friends, family, and colleagues have said to me when I asked them how they feel about Smitten Kitchen are (nearly verbatim from all of them) some variation of “I’d trust Deb with anything” or “Smitten Kitchen taught me how to cook.” From the beginning, Perelman’s familiar, candid writing lured readers into her teeny kitchen, disarming any anxiety one might have about attempting to make dough from scratch for a fruit galette. For many home cooks, Smitten Kitchen has always felt like cooking with a friend. 

That casual-yet-knowing tone, as well as her dreamy photography, allowed her recipes to become the standards a generation pulls out for weeknight dinners and parties alike. My summers are made of zucchini quesadillas and blueberry boy bait, my winters of mushroom bourguignon. My mother and I can both make her blondies from memory, and I have still maybe never felt so accomplished as when I perfectly executed her chocolate peanut butter icebox cake for my wife’s birthday, having spent an afternoon making individual black cocoa wafers. Other blogs may have taught you about the science behind the recipe, or meticulously walked you through a certain cuisine, but no other food blog was as instrumental in allowing its audience to explore cooking with confidence and ease.

Twenty years is pushing the limit of how long a blog can exist, especially as the internet increasingly fragments and is captured by corporate interests. In that time, there have been multiple pivots to video, an ever-changing landscape of social media platforms, and now everyone and their mother is launching a newsletter. In food media specifically, recipes feel optimized toward clicks and virality, everything promising a new “hack” or “trick” to convince those who loathe cooking that they should do it.

Other food blogs of the era, like Orangette and Nosh With Me, shuttered or morphed into different things, their creators stepping away, or stepping deeper into careers in food. But not only has Perelman stayed in the picture, but she’s done it on her own terms. Her recipes are often easy, yes, but it’s not because they rely on hacks. It’s because she tests them, updates them, iterates on them — and because they’re good. Where other bloggers may have shuttered their site to parlay internet fame into a recipe writing gig at a major food magazine or newspaper, pursued TV show hosting, or chased any number of ways one can be famous in food these days, Perelman has ensured Smitten Kitchen remains the banner under which she is heralded. And she plans to do it for as long as the internet will let her.

“I had no business being in the food space because I had no authority and no experience,” she says. “So what was I going to do? I was like, I'll do my own thing. That was the promise of the web!”

“Don’t you need this?” Perelman asks as she pushes a plate of olive oil cake to me at Abraco in the East Village in Manhattan, admitting she was barely hungry after Pilates but couldn’t not order it. It’s immediately easy to see how she could earn her readers’ trust. She has the air of a cool older sister, a woman with taste who wants to share all her secrets with you, the kind of woman who seems to be doing exactly what she wants. Probably because she is. 

In the early 2000s, Perelman was working as an art therapist in a nursing home and, while she enjoyed gossiping with senior citizens all day, she realized it wasn’t her calling. “I had a friend, or an ex, who told me blogging was everything,” she said. With the launch of services like Blogger in 1999, and TypePad and WordPress in 2003, having a website suddenly didn’t require a computer engineering degree. You could just post. Perelman’s early blogging looked like everyone’s attempt those days — a diary of everything and nothing, stories and stray thoughts about dating, New York, whatever. It didn’t matter. She didn’t expect anyone to read it. 

However, the DNA of Smitten Kitchen was always in that blog. She included her early adventures in cooking, which some readers responded to. Food became more of a focus after she met her husband and stopped having roommates. “I realized I liked cooking a few nights a week,” she said. She had a variety of tastes to build from. Her mother, she says, learned to cook from Julia Child’s books, and the family picked up more inspiration from California cuisine after her German Jewish grandparents moved from Queens to San Diego.. Growing up in New Jersey, she learned to love even more varied cuisines from friends and neighbors. So when she started cooking more, she came with her own opinions. “I was like, Wow, this recipe is terrible. This recipe is excellent. Oh, you guys don't put all the salt in this one. So that's really how it started,” she says. 

In the summer of 2006, 20 years ago, she officially rebranded her previous blog to Smitten Kitchen, and went all in on cooking. Food was the subject for numerous early blogs, as the rise of the Food Network and shows like Top Chef made everyone a foodie. She promised “fearless cooking from a tiny NYC kitchen,” about 80-square feet in a fourth-floor walk-up in Manhattan. 

The first recipe Perelman shared was for chipotle baked beans, adapted from a 1999 issue of Bon Appétit, which she describes as “everything your last can of baked beans thought it was going to be when it grew up.” She skips the bacon, advises readers to adjust the chipotle based on their spice tolerance, and says you won’t miss the parsley garnish if you forget it. By August, she was telling us that Martha Stewart’s and Mark Bittman’s recipes for baby artichokes had failed her (so she developed her own), and was mashing up recipes from Epicurious and old issues of Gourmet to make a chocolate caramel cheesecake. By December, she was publishing instructions for soft, luscious Russian tea cakes. 

All the while, she applied for jobs in food media, but she kept running up against the insular nature of the media industry. Perelman feels her lack of expertise and connections kept her from getting a foot in the door. “I had no business being in the food space because I had no authority and no experience,” she says. “So what was I going to do? I was like, I'll do my own thing. That was the promise of the web!”

If you read long enough, you can instantly identify a Smitten Kitchen recipe. Perelman describes her niche as "triumphant but unfussy cooking.” She exalts the world of the kitchen but also understands when it’s a burden. This commitment to ease, without sacrificing quality, was something that began to attract readers. She says an early recipe that took off was her version of a zucchini sauté with almonds and pecorino inspired by the now-shuttered Red Cat, which she figured out how to make in one sauté pan instead of two. Her website is a testament to taxonomy, recipes searchable by ingredient, cuisine, holiday, course, season, and time commitment (she has recipes tagged as five ingredients or fewer, and also a guide to making a wedding cake). 

“I think every day about how it feels to be coming home on the train, and you saw a recipe, and you went and bought the ingredients with energy you didn't have, time you didn't have, inclination you lacked to make a recipe,” she says. “How can I make sure I did not lie to you? That I did not waste your time?”

Kelsey McKinney, a staff writer at Defector, began cooking Smitten Kitchen recipes in high school. McKinney was already an avid user of Google Reader, using it to follow blogs like Design Sponge and other accounts of individual women’s lives. “My sister and I had spent our whole childhood watching Rachael Ray after school, and I was like, this is what I need,” she says of finding Perelman’s blog. She was attracted to the straightforwardness of Perelman’s recipes, which often didn’t require expensive ingredients or specialized equipment. Perelman regularly updates recipes when she’s figured out how to streamline a process, or when she’s made a version of something she believes is even better than it was before. 

Much of what Perelman still posts is tweaks and adaptations of other people’s recipes. “It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t disrespectful to change a recipe,” she says. Smitten Kitchen was about sharing what works for her, after all, and she’s happy to give credit where credit is due. “I really always resented the idea that if you were linking to sources or talking about what influenced you, that you weren't going to get a cookbook deal or that you weren't a real cook,” she says. “I want you to tell me you learned about whipped cream from Nancy Silverton. I think it tells a better story.” 

Perelman was also a warm, welcoming presence when Shah was trying to learn how to cook recipes outside of the Indian food she grew up with. Perelman tends to stay in a culinary lane, making easy weeknight dinners and rich baked goods with a pan-Western-European palate, sprinkled with inspiration from her and her husband’s German Jewish and Russian backgrounds, respectively. “She had all this kind of stuff down that I was never going to be able to learn from my mom or anybody else in my life,” says Shah. 

When Perelman does veer off that path, she loads on the caveats; She calls herself “someone who at best inauthentically dabbles in Indian cooking,” in a recipe for sheet pan chicken tikka, adapted from a Meera Sodha recipe. She notes when she was “craving a flavor profile” in a Thai-ish steak salad, but names the dishes, yum neua yangandneua naam tok,it’s riffing on. “She does things from a place of respect, and doesn't ever act like she invented something,” says Shah. 

She hasn’t stayed totally unscathed but, like her acknowledgments, her apologies are obvious and freely given when she’s had to give them. In 2016 she published “5 Times I Kinda Stepped In It at Smitten Kitchen,” including publishing a recipe for cupcakes with chocolate and whiskey with an offensive name. “It was one of the first times I found that having a wide audience was making me a nicer or at least more mature person,” she wrote.

Perelman’s appeal was that she was, and is, an honest-to-god blogger. Her writing is honest and charming, a little confessional, and a lot casual. She wants to divulge. From the beginning, she says that she focused on making sure the stories and instructions she wrote sounded the same as they sounded in her head, instead of editing them to be more poetic or academic. She writes as she speaks. “It always sounded like she was your friend talking to you,” says Shah, who says she had that style in mind when writing her own headnotes for her cookbook. “I wanted it to be very approachable, that people feel like they can genuinely cook from it, and I think that's also Deb's magic. All of her stuff feels incredibly doable. There’s nothing on her website where I think I can’t make that.”

In the middle of our chat, it dawned on Perelman that it had already been 20 years. After all this time, she still doesn’t have a PR person to keep track of such milestones. And she is hesitant to consider herself an authority, even after two decades of making cooking and blogging her job. “I'm not saying if you have authority you shouldn't have it, but I do not care whether I'm correct. I am just going to tell you what worked for me,” she says. But for those of us raised on blogs, she holds as much weight as Ina or Martha (and just as much of a mononym). 

At the beginning of the blog boom, blogging allowed a writer to get their name out there without having to pass the well-kept gates of food media. Many of these early food blogs had on-site ad capabilities — WordPress had a plugin that made running them automatic — but it was never a guarantee that you’d make any money off them. The promise, instead, was that like Julie Powell and her Julie & Julia blog, the right powerful person would find your writing and offer you a job, or a book deal, or possibly even a movie. 

Many former bloggers have taken that path. Erway has gone on to write cookbooks and win a James Beard Award for her writing in TASTE. Pim Techamuanvivit, who started her blog Chez Pim in 2001, became a professional chef, and her restaurant Kin Khao received a Michelin Star in 2014. Molly Wizenberg of Orangette has published memoirs and a novel, and teaches workshops on personal writing. Their blogs are all dormant. “If I could, I would keep doing the blog,” says Erway. But she increasingly wanted to keep her ideas for outlets that might pay and, even if she had been making money off blogging, the desire to go to a blog and see what the person behind it is musing about that day had fallen out of fashion. “I loved creating that content. I just don’t think it was the world’s thing anymore,” she says.

Digital media is, yet again, at a crossroads. The ad model that was always tenuous is now fully collapsing. The infiltration of AI into the traffic that search engines used to generate means that far fewer people are clicking on links. Instead, they just read the AI-generated summary given to them by Google or ChatGPT and go on their way. This means pageviews are tanking, which makes advertisers that pay by the pageview are putting their dollars elsewhere, which has forced websites and blogs to pull back, lay people off, and shutter.

Perelman is one of the lucky few who can still pay the bills through running ads on her website, and she knows that could end tomorrow. “I can’t even tell you if I'm going to have that in two years,” she says. She has tried to stay savvy about expanding her reach and trying new things while making sure she doesn’t dilute the blog people have come to love. She’s on Substack, where her newsletter has nearly 300,000 subscribers, and finally started making video content for TikTok and YouTube. To maintain her ecosystem, she keeps her recipes only on the Smitten Kitchen site, directing everything back to the core product. 

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That’s why the rise of AI has her “shaking with rage,” she says, as she sees services like ChatGPT generate recipes written and tested by no one, but clearly based on real people’s work. “You should not be able to copy and paste my recipes that I developed, that is my living,” she fumes. After all, she’s based so much of her authority on citing her sources. Stripping her name from her work and presenting it in a contextless ether is antithetical to everything she’s built, and the way blogs from the era she emerged from work.

But Smitten Kitchen has never lived or died by people typing “best birthday cake recipe” into Google. What Perelman has created over the years is a dedicated audience, people who will still type the URL into a web browser every day to see what she’s up to, and who cook whatever she’s posted just because she posted it. Her homepage has barely changed since she launched. Why should it? What about it isn’t serving the people it needs to serve?

Perelman is scrolling through her photo library with me. First, a block of sunlit photos of spaghetti aglio e olio, “the perfect beach house meal,” she says, when you realize the owners have left jack shit in the pantry. Then, some videos of homemade ice cream sandwiches. She’s working on a peach cobbler loaf for when your peaches go too soft immediately after buying them, and a rib recipe that doesn’t involve hauling out the grill. A pasta salad with corn. Sicilian potato salad with olives and capers. Grilled wings where the glaze doubles as a salad dressing. “I just have been having so much fun putting different glazes on wings,” she leans in to say, as if sharing a secret.

She sounds like she could talk about her kitchen experiments all day. She jokes that she hopes she gets tired of the job before it gets tired of her (or the internet ceases to exist), but hearing her talk about whipping up hangar steak and a plate of cantaloupe and prosciutto for friends, that sounds impossible. That sort of spontaneous dinner is what her fourth cookbook, which she’s currently working on, will be about. 

So far, her cookbooks have all been published about five years apart, and that’s how she likes it. She wants to take her time, both because she works better on her own schedule, and because she never wants cookbook work to take away from her regular schedule on Smitten Kitchen. “I don’t want the website to die while I’m working on another project,” she says.