You’ve volunteered to bring dessert to a dinner party. You want to knock ’em dead with an old-fashioned chocolate cake. You own 200 cookbooks, and clearly, some of them contain recipes for chocolate cake. But which ones? How do the recipes compare? And what about that one woman, Bridget – isn’t she a vegan? And a pagan? And doesn’t she have one of those open marriages? My gawd, what’s that like?
But you digress.
The point is, owning shelf upon shelf of cookbooks is an embarrassment of riches, but the books aren’t cross-referenced. Wouldn’t it make life easier if they were?
Enter Eat Your Books, a new online service that offers a master index for your whole (or nearly your whole) library of cookbooks.
The benefits are worth noting here – you can enter one or more ingredients that you have on hand and locate recipes that feature them, in cookbooks you already own. You can locate that great recipe for balsamic-glazed asparagus that you misplaced years ago. You can search for recipes by ethnicity or special diet, or create new categories, menus and lists. You can find out if a favorite cook has a recipe for a favorite dish (how does Paula Deen make her cheese grits?). And as noted above, you can compare similar recipes across a number of cookbooks and decide which works best for you.
Eat Your Books’ database contains 16,000 cookbooks and counting. The site, which does require payment, also provides a communal place for cooks and cookbook fetishists to share ideas.
– Byron Kerman
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2010.