No, you can't copyright recipes. But so what?
People visit recipe sites because they are either planning to cook something soon and need to set their shopping list or because they're actively about to start cooking. In neither case does anyone want to read ten pages of fake "humanizing" backstory and wade through a mountain of ads just to get to what they need to know.
Regardless of the recipe itself - which will still get copied no matter how long and dumb of prose goes along with it - the website will always be subject to copyright and trademark laws. I could not create a clone of Epicurious or Food.com, and make a new site that looks exactly the same using all the pages and stuff they created without getting sued. But I could take their recipes and rewrite them elsewhere, just as I can with random click bait sites that have pages and pages of nonsense to read before you find the key information.
Point being: There is no legal advantage here.
No. The advantage of writing those long stories on click bait sites is actually the SEO. Lots of copy featuring lots of words that people might search for (eg. "Biscuits just like grandma makes" or "my mom's homemade chicken noodle soup", etc.) helps keep those kinds of sites high in Google/social media search rankings. The other benefit is that the more time you spend on a page, and the more you have to scroll, the more ads get shoved in your face - giving more money to those sites.
Tl;dr: This is about search algorithms and ads, not copyright.