In this international community, visitors are encouraged to respond to each recipe they try with improvements, alternatives, and suggestions.

Those instructions are not limited to the originally posted recipes themselves. Although a majority of women in Japan work outside the home, traditional gender roles still assign them primary responsibility for cooking, and accordingly, an estimated 90 percent of Japanese women in their 20s and 30s rely on the recipe site for ideas and instructions. The company started in Japan, and the Cookpad site designed for Japanese users continues to account for most of its estimated 100 million monthly visitors. Their recipes tend to reflect their native cultures, such that users might learn how to make one contributor’s grandfather’s barbacoa, then another’s mother’s korokke. The contributors give hints, tricks, and shortcuts, often using informal, chatty descriptions. Rather than single, glossy images of perfectly designed dishes, Cookpad posts usually contain multiple pictures of the entire process of creating the dish and realistic presentations of the end result. The idea behind Cookpad, since it first appeared in 1997, was to collect home recipes, offered up by regular users. consumers will have to page farther down to find the Cookpad ideas, a gap that reflects both the site’s targeting efforts and Americans’ food habits. If they are in virtually any country other than the United States, the search results are dominated by a recipe site called Cookpad.

When at-home cooks seek inspiration, ideas, or new recipes, they go online and put in a few search terms-maybe ingredients they have on hand or a regional cuisine that sparks a craving at that moment.

Cookpad recipe