Linguists have found that cookery recipes were the first 'blogs'

This is the conclusion reached by Professor of English and Digital Linguistics Christiana Sanchez-Stockhammer from the Technical University of Chemnitz.

Her research has shown that recipes, especially in English-speaking countries, are much more "personal" than is commonly believed. The work is published in the journal Anglistik.

Sanchez-Stockhammer analysed 280 recipes from the internet to find out how often personal pronouns such as "I" and "you" appear in them. It turned out that, despite the stereotype about the "dry" style of cookery instructions, pronouns are indeed present - although they are about half as frequent as in other types of texts.

Traditionally, recipes are formulated without explicitly indicating the performer: for example, instead of "You add the potatoes and pour salted water over them" you write "Add the potatoes and pour salted water over them".

However, in some cases pronouns are still used, most commonly "it", which has a grammatical function: "It takes a bit of time, but it's worth it".

The scientist also identified where pronouns are most often found.

Thus, in the names of dishes and lists of ingredients they are practically absent, with rare exceptions, as in the notes "540 g of white fish (I prefer to use pollock or bass)". But recipe introductions - those long stories before the ingredients block that so annoy many users - contain even more pronouns than regular texts.

The reason is simple: introductions often tell a personal story - how the author learnt this recipe, why it is dear to him, who cooked this dish before.

"Many people think that this is an invention of the Internet and blogging era, but my analysis shows that this approach did not appear yesterday," notes Sanchez-Stockhammer.

For example, a popular Australian cookbook back in 1864 emotionally described apple dumplings with the words "we hardly know any better".

"Cookery recipes are not just instructions. They are full of emotion. By sharing a recipe, a person shares the joy of eating. And personal pronouns help establish a connection between the author, the reader and the recipe itself," the researcher emphasises.

Thus, recipes are not only about how to cook, but also about why the recipe is important. And this tradition of adding emotion and personal experience has been around for more than 160 years.