Smitten Kitchen is the most popular blog in the EYB Library by a large margin, on 50% more bookshelves than the next largest blog, Food52 (there are pinned blogs at the top which is why SK isn't the first one listed). Deb Perelman started serving up delicious, attainable recipes twenty (!) years ago, when blogging was just starting to take off. At Ravenous, Jaya Saxena just interviewed Perelman about achieving this milestone, and how she has managed to stay in the game while other bloggers from the same era have faded away.

Saxena writes that Perelman's appeal is due largely on her ability to disarm people from anxiety they might have about cooking with a "casual-yet-knowing" tone accompanied by stellar photography. Perelman was one of the first to really lean into making food photos look fabulous - perhaps it has to do with her previous job of being an art therapist in a nursing home. But photos alone don't make a successful food blog. The writing also has to be top-notch and the recipes have to work. Perelman excels at these as well. She has earned her dedicated followers through continually refining and updating her recipes, and making them doable for the average home cook.

Perelman realizes she is fortunate to still be able to make a living with an ad-supported blog with the changes that have happened to SEO and search rankings, but wonders how long that will last. She also has strong words about AI that generates recipes by scraping content from food writers and recipe developers, saying “You should not be able to copy and paste my recipes that I developed, that is my living.”

While she has branched out into a Substack and has dipped her toes in the waters of video content (TikTok and YouTube), the blog has remained Perelman's main platform. She only publishes recipes on the blog, not via the other media she is using, and she hopes to continue Smitten Kitchen indefinitely. “I am totally open to trying new things,” she says, “but the truth is that I really just love the internet and I really love having a blog." And what a great blog it is. Congratulations on 20 years!