It would be nice if I could search my cookbook indexes online. For obvious reasons, only the indexes would be available, just to give you an idea of whether there is a recipe for X in my 2 shelves of books.

There could also be a function that would allow you to search your books by ingredient to suggest recipes that include a list of ingredients. This would be confined only to the books that you have.

There could always be links to outside sources and recipes that match your search terms (maybe with bonus recipes from Mr. Bittman et al.), but the main idea is to be able to search the cookbooks that you have chosen according to your personal tastes and experience.

Being part of the this could be a selling point for cookbooks.
-- nomocrow, Jun 11 2009

+ In the mean time, you could probably xerox the indexes in all your books and put them in a 3 ring binder.
An alphabetical index by recipe indicating which book would be much nicer, though. Maybe you could pay some kid on summer break to enter the indexes in excel, sort them, and print it out for you?

(You would have to do some data entry, sorting, and reprinting if you bought a new cookbook, though).
-- Zimmy, Jun 11 2009


[Zimmy] It would take some time. Julia Child's "The Way To Cook" has about 2,500 index entries, and Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" has over 4,200. We have over 40 cookbooks, so at a conservative 1,000 entries per index, we're looking at some 40,000 entries, but probably much more.

But thank you for the excellent idea on the 3-ring binder. I believe I'll do just that, with index tabs by cuisine, until technology catches up.
-- nomocrow, Jun 11 2009


A scanner, OCR and a little format massaging should glean a text file you can import into a spreadsheet
-- BunsenHoneydew, Jun 12 2009



random, halfbakery