Cookbook collectors have a different challenge than most book collectors. Their books aren't just for reading—although that is a large part of the pleasure of owning them—but also for using. When looking for recipe ideas, trying to use a specific ingredient, or plan a meal around special dietary considerations it can be fun to go through all those cookbooks looking for ideas—if there's time.
However, owners of even medium-sized cookbook collections often find that when there isn't sufficient time to go through numerous books, looking through tables of contents and indexes for specific terms. Often that means the cook either falls back on favorite recipes or looks online for a recipe. Either direction underutilizes the value that should be derived from having the book collection.
The Advantages of Hard Copy Recipes Versus Online Recipes
And while there are numerous recipes online that can be easily and quickly found, using recipes from a cookbook collection has numerous advantages over simply searching on line:
- The odds of finding high quality, successful recipes are much higher when they come from owned books that have already proven their quality.
- Favorite recipes are always physically at hand—no need to remember on which website a previously used recipe can be found, or the password to an online personal cookbook.
- Owners can feel free to annotate the recipes directly on the book's pages, noting preferences in ingredients or personalizing techniques.
Since the beginning of home personal computing, and even before then, there have been several solutions to keeping copies of favorite recipes. These include loading recipes into a software program like MasterCook or a pre-designed template, scanning recipe pages and printing them out, and the old-fashioned techniques of adding recipes to index cards or applying yellow stickies to the cookbook pages.
However, there haven't yet been easy solutions to searching through a large cookbook collection to find new recipe suggestions or recipes that use specified ingredients. The book collector could create a personal database with all this information, but that requires significant effort to both create and maintain.
Online Indexing Maximizes the Value of Cookbooks
The new website, Eat Your Books, provides the obvious solution—a website that doesn't post actual recipes, but rather maintains a large data base that includes a list of the recipes found in a cookbook, along with ingredients. Further, they have also catalogued the recipes in numerous ways, e.g. by recipe type, cultural origin, and suitability to special dietary needs.
Using the Eat Your Books is easy; the user finds their cookbook on the site and simply searches under the desired parameters. The site permits users to also create their own online cookbook libraries; an especially helpful feature if a cookbook collection numbers in the hundreds. The key to whether the user will find the site useful is whether the indexed cookbooks matches the user's collection. The site states it has indexed 700 books and 176,000 recipes to date, with new books added daily.
And, along the same principle, users can search books they don't currently own to determine if the book is appropriate to add to their collection.
While book sales have been hurt by the recession and the challenge of digital books, one area that hasn't experienced a dramatic drop in sales is cookbooks. However, that doesn't mean that users don't want to realize maximum value for their investment. Eat Your Books could be a significant help in this direction.
NOTE: This is a paid website; however, it does offer a 30 day free trial.
Lindsay McSweeney - I am a 50 plus professional editor, wife, and mother. I've written and edited food articles professionally, and am currently managing a ...
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