It’s always a pleasant surprise when you come across something that, prior to the moment of discovery, you never even knew you needed. Eat Your Books is a website that allows you to search the indexes of your printed cookbook collection. With a database of over 16,000 cookbooks and counting, you create your bookshelf by adding cookbooks that you own. If the cookbook is one of the many that are indexed by Eat Your Books, you add it to your database. I’ve just started populating my bookshelf and, so far, I’ve run across only a handful of my books that aren’t in their system.No more flipping to the back of cookbook after cookbook, looking through the index, trying to find the right recipe that you’re looking for. This combines the best of both worlds – online recipe indexes with the tactile joy of a printed cookbook. Search for a recipe – say, “Minestrone” – and Eat Your Books shows you a list of all the cookbooks in your collection with a Minestrone recipe as well as the recipe name.*
Not only is this really handy, but I tend to reach for the same few cookbooks over and over, and I think this will give me a nudge to use cookbooks in my collection that have been forgotten about.
All in all, a really cool tool for cooks with a sizeable cookbook collection who are looking for a way to organize and really tap into the full scope of what they have available to them right in their own kitchen library.
* It does not give you the page number or the actual recipe.
Source: Tasting Table
