early pearl was just about having an awesome tool at your disposal. There was minimal code written in a team environment.
People were still amazed that you could do X in 1 line rather than 100 lines. Some people couldn't have done those 100 lines.
So the idea of recipes/spells/hacks was an intentional parallel.
It became a cultural thing. New people wanted to be respected for compact code that impressed people the same way they were impressed.