Cookbookery: Eat Your Books

It will come as no surprise to you that I adore cookbooks. I've got a shelf of more than fifty of them. I named my blog after my tendency to buy them, even when I have no rational need for more. Although a startling amount of my cooking lately comes from recipes I find on the internet - through blogs or favorite cooking sites - there's no substitute for leafing through an old favorite off the shelf. The pictures, the anecdotes, the scribbled notes in margins, the forest of sticky tabs marking recipes to try someday...well, I suspect that if you're reading this, you get it.

If digital copies of all of my cookbooks magically appeared on my Kindle tomorrow, I'd still keep my worn, stained, and well-loved paper copies. Wouldn't you?

Yet there's another side of me - the side that loves spreadsheets, precision, and lists. For years I've wished there was a way to have a quickly accessible index of all the recipes in all of my cookbooks, so that if I was in need of a great recipe for chicken pot pie or banana bread or bœuf bourguignonne, I could see them all at once and know what to pull off the shelf. I figured that it was only a matter of time before some internet genius figured out how to do this. At last, someone has.

Recently, the kind folks at Eat Your Books invited me to check out their service. Basically, they index cookbooks so that - yes! - you can finally have all your cookbook recipes in one place. Invest a few minutes entering your collection, and you can search for anything. Anything! I think it took me about fifteen minutes to add all my books, and all but a few esoteric ones were already indexed on the site. If you have a book that hasn't been indexed yet, you can request it, and presumably they'll put it on their to-do list.

I had a pound of ricotta cheese that I had bought for some reason, sitting unused in the fridge. I searched "ricotta" on my virtual bookshelf at Eat Your Books, and 132 recipes came back. That's right. 132 things I can do with ricotta cheese, right there on my bookshelves. The recipes are even tagged with other major ingredients, so you can see at a glance what else you might need for a recipe before you even pull the book off your shelf. You can refine your search by ingredient, course, occasion, and even ethnicity (say, if you want to put your cookbooks through the paces and find a ricotta recipe from Scandinavia). I think I'm in love.

If you're interested, you can try a trial membership at Eat Your Books, which allows you to add your top five cookbooks for free. Or you can upgrade to a full membership at $2.50 per month or $25 per year. It's definitely a resource worth investigating if your cookbook collection is getting a little unwieldy, and you want to be able to access all those recipes in a snap.

In the interest of full disclosure, Eat Your Books gave me a free upgraded membership, but they did not ask for anything in return. Unlike some other please-give-us-a-glowing-review-for-cash-and-free-stuff solicitations I've received (and declined) recently, they think their product speaks for itself. And if I didn't like Eat Your Books, you wouldn't be hearing about it, period.