that’s not actually why they do it. it’s because recipes are not copyrightable. so they throw in a “story” to make it something they can copyright and try to prevent people from duplicating.
How would having additional content above the recipe change the copyright status of the recipe itself, divorced from the additional content? It prevents directly copying the entire article, but not the actual recipe (and Google already heavily penalizes exact duplicate content).
What would make more sense is that they are actually taking the recipes from elsewhere and adding the stories to avoid directly duplicating another page, and the Google ranking penalty associated with exact or close duplicates.
My moderate experience with SEO suggests it's a combination of factors. First, Google generally rewards longer content (https://www.sweor.com/seocontentlength), or at least content longer than the few hundred words a simple recipe would likely be limited to.
Secondly, there is (mixed) evidence that Google rewards sites on which people spend longer before clicking back.
Thirdly, the longer format allows them to insert more keywords/longer tail keywords vs. a short format where inserting lots of keywords would be seen as keyword stuffing.
I'd also guess that as much as some people dislike superfluous stories when looking for a recipe, it is a positive for a subset of users that are more likely to subscribe to/return to that site directly in the future.
That's specific to recipe. Here I meant in general - e.g. blogs and news articles that bury the core point / answer somewhere around the final 1/3 of text, but also don't seem to exploit the artificially elongated text to expose you to more ads.
