A clever invention makes for a perfect holiday gift for your favorite foodie, your generous host, your cookbook hoarder. You may try it for free, too.
The best innovations are the ones that become a regular part of your life. The ones that make you say “This makes so much sense, why didn’t I think of this first?” So it was with Jane Kelly, founder of Eat Your Books. A fellow self-confessed cookbook hoarder, Jane found herself wanting a way to find which of her cookbooks might contain a recipe for something like homemade chicken stock. Search engines will turn up millions of recipes, many relevant, many more not. What if you could filter that search for only your own cookbooks?
Solving a Common Problem: Too Many Cookbooks
As with many practical inventions, Eat Your Books was borne of a day-to-day need. Any cook with more than a couple of cookbooks will recognize this dilemma. You decide you want to make dinner and you can’t remember which of your many cookbooks has a recipe for fill-in-the-blank. We have our go-to dishes, the recipes in the regular rotation. Then we also have a slew of cookbooks acquired as gifts, contributed by publicists, purchased with good intentions. And many of these books (maybe even most) sit largely unused.
And why? We simply don’t have the time to pore over each and every one. Or, if you’re like me, you get distracted and suddenly you’ve re-read three cookbooks cover to cover and you are no closer to finding the recipe that strikes your fancy today. More importantly, you’re no closer to dinner!
I spoke with founder Jane Kelly recently to learn more about what went into this site. Just after we spoke this mega-index passed a significant milestone: 500,000 recipes indexed (manually, too!)
A Card Catalog on Steroids
Many of us are accustomed to using sites like Epicurious to find recipes. We may assume that Eat Your Books is another recipe site. It’s not. Think of Eat Your Books as a super fast, knowledgeable librarian friend on stand-by, one with a good story to tell.
EYB is the only site I know that indexes all my cookbooks, my favorite magazines and blogs in one spot. Eat Your Books contains an index to your own cookbooks.
As we move into the holiday and entertaining season, many guests are looking for inspired hostess gifts, or original holiday gifts. Why not give your favorite foodie a subscription to this site? For about the cost of a bottle of wine ($25), you can bring your favorite hostess a gift that will keep on giving, long after the glasses have been dried and the dishes from the dinner party have been put away.
How it works
Let’s say you’re planning a holiday meal and you can’t remember where that recipe for your favorite pecan pie is. Was it in Joy of Cooking? Silver Palate? Or maybe it was in one of these Southern cookbooks that have arrived, Tupelo Kitchen? Bon Appetit, Y'all?
Maybe one of your favorite magazines has one in their Thanksgiving edition? How to find it?
You could:
- Go through the stacks of books around the house and pore over each one, looking at the TOC, the index;
- Flip through the stack of magazines on your coffee table to see if that is where you saw the recipe;
- Do a Google search and look at the first few pages worth of the 4.5 million search results; Or...
- Go to Eat Your Books and check your own bookshelf and type in “Pecan Pie”
You’ll get a list of all your own cookbooks that have a pecan pie recipe. (Then it’s up to you to find where you shelved it.) This site doesn't solve all our problems, but it does point us to the recipe in our own collection.
To set up “your bookshelf” all you have to do is enter the titles into the search bar on the Library page. You may also enter multiple ISBN numbers for quick upload.
Conveniently, they’ve added magazines and blogs, too. New features are planned and recently they’ve added the ability to index our own personal recipes, as well. Subscribers can even index their own personal recipes, a feature that's taken off.
The Shelf Life Blog
Two additional features are worth checking out. One is the ”Shelf Life” blog where well-known food writer and editor T. Susan Chang shares updates on the new material being added just about dail.
Her straightforward and thoughtful blog: Shelf Life always surprises. Ever wonder how she evaluates cookbooks? Turns out it’s seven things she always comes back to. This is a must-read for any would-be cookbook author.
More features are in the works, there's a community forum where you can chat with fellow cookbook hoarders, I mean lovers.
Whether you'd like to thank Jane for this useful site, or scold her for enabling your hoarding habit, you will, I promise, find yourself returning time and again to EatYourBooks.com.
Jacqueline Church - Award-winning writer, speaker, teacher on topics at the intersection of gourmet and sustainable food issues.
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