Eat Your Books

Eat Your Books lets you do an online search for recipes in cookbooks as well as websites and blogs. All your favorites are at the touch of your keyboard or cell phone. Finally, your recipes organized in a manner that helps you find recipes quickly. Including, natch, those from Leite’s Culinaria.

You’ve stashed stacks of cookbooks in all corners of your house. At last count, back issues of 5 different food magazines await your attention. You’ve filled 3 shoeboxes to overflowing with handwritten recipes on index cards, recipes clipped from newspapers, and recipe ideas scribbled on the back of a receipt or envelope. Cooking newsletters outnumber real emails 3-to-1 in your inbox. And your newsfeed is dominated by at least a dozen food blogs and well-curated culinary websites (present company included, we trust).

You also have absolutely no idea what to make for dinner tonight.

Sound familiar?

We understand. With apologies to Mae West, too much of a good thing can be wonderful. But it can also be, well, a little much.

Here’s our simple game-changing advice: Eat Your Books.

We’ve been in awe of the aptly named service since its early days, and we’ve recently fallen in love with it all over again thanks to some pretty spectacular upgrades.

For those of you unfamiliar with Eat Your Books (EYB), it’s a website that allows you to create a single, searchable index of all the recipes in your personal collection of cookbooks, magazines, and recipe clippings. Simply tell EYB which books you own (they’ve indexed almost every known cookbook) or upload the recipes you’ve written or collected.

Just like that, you’ve created an online bookshelf that’s searchable in seconds. No more flipping through cookbook after cookbook hoping to find what you need. EYB does the work in seconds thanks to its database of more than 1.7 million indexed recipes. It quickly matches your search query to the exact page number of a book you already possess in your collection or to the link for an online recipe. You can search by any keyword—an ingredient languishing in the fridge, a technique you trust or want to try, even something as vague as a type of cuisine when you’re in the mood for, say, something Malaysian. Your search also, natch, includes all 3,200 Leite’s Culinaria recipes that are indexed on Eat Your Books.

We’re particularly excited about EYB’s newly released Digital Books feature. Now you can expand your search to include page previews from select pre-released cookbooks, and if you pre-purchase the book, you’ll also receive digital access to the entire book upon publication, giving you the ability to see, use, and search the book’s recipes wherever you can access EYB, whether you’re on vacation, at work, or in the grocery store.

You won’t find recipes here—just links that direct you to recipes you already have access to or new online suggestions. Think of EYB as a GPS for recipes.

To be sure, EYB isn’t looking to replace the cookbooks we cherish.  “There is no substitute to browsing through much-loved cookbooks,” says Jane Kelly, co-founder of Eat Your Books. “However, it’s impossible to remember every recipe. Our members have cookbook collections from 9 to over 3,000 books and for the first time they are making use of them like never before.”

There’s pretty much nothing that EYB can’t do to improve your recipe management.  Additional features include the ability to create bookmarks, jot down cooking notes, upload photos, and share reviews via community forums. A searchable recipe box, menu advisor, and culinary scrapbook all in one place? You can see why we’re smitten.

Eat Your Books offers two membership options. Free access allows users to upload the titles of five books or magazines to create a custom online bookshelf. Premium membership ($30/year) provides an unlimited number of title uploads which creates a searchable index of all recipes in the member’s home collection of books, magazines, and personal recipes. All EYB users have access to the site’s extensive index of online recipe sources as well the revolutionary new EYBDigital Books feature.