Eat Your Books: A Master Index for Your Cookbooks

One thing that frustrates me is having a large cookbook library but being unable to quickly track down a single recipe I am looking for or find something inspiring to make for dinner. I have to rely on my increasingly unreliable memory. I briefly thought about creating my own database of the recipes in my cookbooks, but that is way too much work. So I went on the web to look for a solution.

What I found was Eat Your Books. I am trying it out now, and so far, it has been a massively useful tool. It provides searchable, categorized indexes to (almost) all of my cookbooks. There is a monthly or annual fee, but it is not onerous considering all the work that it saves. Once I put in my cookbook collection, I had 20,000+ recipes at my fingertips that were already in my library. I guess I shouldn’t run out of anything to make for dinner for a while.

All but 9 of my cookbooks were already indexed (I have a lot of cookbooks). Each recipe is categorized by dish, major ingredient, ethnicity, occasion and more, and once I pick what I want to cook, I can generate a shopping list. And I can search online recipes or add my own to that database. Once I make something, I can record notes, rate it or tag it so I don’t forget where it was.

I am loving this site (and I am not getting anything from them for posting this review).

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