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New website creates master index of your cookbooks |
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Written by julie Cooper
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Tuesday, 03 January 2012 19:24 |
I’ve always had a thing for cookbooks. My favorite cookbook growing up was my mom’s 1963 edition of Betty Crocker’s “Cooky Book.” Its mod cover featured cookies of all shapes decked with maraschino cherries, silver balls, and fluorescent icing. Fresh out of graduate school, I worked as an editor in the New York for a few years, during which time I befriended several of the cookbook editors at the publishing house. In turn, they passed along used and new copies of books they were editing, and-in lieu of a grand salary-I amassed a fortune of cookbooks.
I had no idea how many cookbooks I’d acquired until this Christmas, when my husband gave me a gift that is perhaps my favorite of all time. On Christmas morning, I received a handwritten slip of paper with the cryptic  web address: www.eatyourbooks.com and my user name and password.
For an annual fee of $25, eatyourbooks.com enables members to have an online, personalized search engine for their private cookbook collections. Eat Your Books has indexed hundreds of cookbooks-chances are, if you own cookbooks that have been published in English in the last 10 years, or are old classics-they will be indexed. After you become a member, you just need to enter the titles of all your cookbooks, and then the website makes it possible for you to search your own cookbook library for the precise recipe you want.
My husband entered all 220 of our cookbooks into the site before I opened my gift, so that on Christmas morning, when I entered the words, “crème frâiche,” I discovered there were over 400 results for recipes using “crème frâiche,” in cookbooks that I already owned. The site does not allow you to view the recipes themselves, but it does generate automatic grocery shopping lists (so you can determine if you have what you need in your house to make the recipe before consulting the book), and rate the recipes after you’ve enjoyed the results. Membership at the site also has other nifty features that I’m still learning how to use, but I wanted to share my beginner’s excitement in the hopes that others would begin to rediscover their cookbook collections, too. On Christmas day I added two new cookbooks (my husband’s presents, not mine!) to my eatyourbooks.com digital library, bringing it up to 222. Maybe it’s time to stop now?
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