Digital tools change the way cooks access recipes
With a box full of carrots and a hankering for something vaguely exotic, Mary-Claire van Leunen turned to her computer for a recipe.
“I looked for ‘Turkish carrots,’ and I found it easily; in fact, I found half a dozen,” said the retired Seattle software researcher.
Almost everyone’s done it — fired up a search engine to deal with that bumper crop of squash. But van Leunen wasn’t randomly appealing to the online universe. She was searching the recipes in her own cookbooks, the roughly 2,000 volumes that line her shelves. Without ever cracking a single spine.
“In the past, I would have gone to the Central Asian section of my books and gone through the indexes,” van Leunen said. “I would have looked in two or three cookbooks, and wound up adapting something for fennel or something to the carrots.”
Today, the online cookbook indexing service called Eat Your Books lets her instantly search the index of nearly every cookbook she owns.
When she finds the recipe she wants, the website tells her the book it’s in.
It’s part of a new wave of digital tools that are changing the way home cooks explore new recipes, revisit old ones and create satisfying meals.
Eat Your Books, launched nine months ago, boasts a library of 88,000 books with more than 2,000 indexed volumes. Users just tell the site which cookbooks they own, then they can quickly peruse the recipes of the chefs and authors they already trust.
Likewise, the site Cookstr catalogs recipes from more than 500 chefs and cookbook authors and offers them to users — free of charge.
“It is completely feasible today that a mobile device will be the center of the connected kitchen, and Cookstr wants to be at the center of that connected kitchen,” said Cookstr chief executive Art Chang.
Michele Kayal
The Associated Press
I love my foodnetwork app on Droid but still use a cookbook every now and again.
I am SO thankful for online recipes! (and the cell phone apps that make them easy to access and to find ways to use what I have in the cupboard)
I have 4 different apps on my Droid that I use all the time… Allrecipes.com, Epicurious, Jamie Oliver and Whats for Dinner. But I also use my favorite cookbooks in addition to the apps.
LOVE allrecipes.com. It’s nice to read other people’s ratings, comments and suggestions on the site…
After moving out, my 2 older boys kept calling ”Mom how do make…..” (trying to impress the girls, Im sure!). So I took the better part of 6 months painstakingly handwriting recipe cards for 2 cookbooks to give to them. Why by hand, you may ask? Because we lived in so rural an area we couldnt afford the $80/mo internet bill, so we never got a computer. Now that Im back in a city, I wish I had waited-I could have copied & pasted EVERYTHING!!!
I love using the internet for recipes, although nothing replaces age old, worn down, hand written recipes by mom. @Suzy… your boys will appreciate all the hard work that went into your home cookbooks!
The internet is great for quick comparisons of old classics. It is still difficult to find anything as special as your mother’s old copies of family recipes stuck in a little box of recipe cards. Hopefully more mom’s will get on-line to post them. Do we have an iRecipe yet?
I have lots of cookbooks that I hardly ever open anymore. I find my recipes online most of the time!
My wife has for many years used her 3-drawer file cabinet filled with recipes and cook books going back as far as her grandmother’s 1940′s edition of Fanny Farmer. But more and more these days you will find her with her laptop opened up on the counter while she cooks. And she never disappoints!
I have wonderful technique cookbooks I couldn’t get by ithout but it is nice to stretch skills usng new ideeas from the net.
I use allrecipes.com a lot! they have a feature where one can enter ingredience at hand and get recipe sugestions. My kids have used youtube to look up how to peel and prepare exotic fruits.
I love to get ideas for meals by looking at online recipes. The best aspect of online assistance is the comments by people who have tried it already! My advice: don’t mess around with baking recipes. It doesn’t work out! Baking is a science; cooking is an art.
I love reading through cookbooks and cooking magazines from the library, and I’ll copy some recipes down to use for later, but my mainstay is allrecipe.com. Thanks to our trip to Miller Farms last week I was in need of ideas for 20lb of potaotes and 10lb of inions. Two days and several batches of three recipes later every bit was cooked and frozen. I also came across recipes for mac & cheese, chicken divan, pizza dough, and chicken puffs…that’s what’s for dinner this week!