A couple months back, I found some recipes in a favorite cookbook calling for an ingredient I didn't have. The ingredient, asafetida, is a funky powder that comes from a plant and a fairly common ingredient in Indian cooking. By the time I found some, though, I forgot which recipe it was in, and I spent an hour before bed rifling through that same cookbook to find the recipes again—not unpleasant, but not a particularly efficient use of my time.
In that hour, though, I remembered a website that I'd signed up for a few years ago, then failed to use. The site, Eat Your Books, is niche, but if you cook a lot and own a bunch of cookbooks, it's excellent. As a quick gauge of utility, imagine stacking all of your cookbooks in a pile on the floor. If that stack comes up to your waist, Eat Your Books will likely be very helpful.
To begin, you tell it all of the cookbooks you own—the company's database has indexed almost 10,000 of them with 1.5 million recipes—then you search for the recipe you want to cook, or ingredients you want to use. The results page gives you recipes from the books you own, usually with the page number. From there, narrow your choices, pick your winner, pull the book from the shelf and tuck it into your cookbook holder. When I plugged in "asafetida," it not only found the recipes I was looking for, but also 21 other recipes in two of my other books.
I signed up for a subscription. A premium membership is $3 a month, or $30 per year. (You can use the website for free, but you can only keep track of five cookbooks unless you pay.) Sitting down one evening in front of my shelves, I plugged in my books and learned I own 68 cookbooks with 14,447 recipes. There were a couple books that it didn't recognize, but those were on the obscure side.
It knows cooking magazines and websites too. Impressively, the entire back catalog for Cooks Illustrated magazine is in there, along with 10-plus years of Food & Wine and Bon Appétit, thousands of recipes from The New York Times (by columnist), and websites like Food52. To varying—and sometimes limited—degrees, you can also filter by criteria like cooking type (grilling, one-pot meals) or ease of preparation.
My hope was that Eat Your Books would bust me out of the rut where I only use a few favorite recipes from a few favorite books. Instead of homing in on those when I got hungry, I'd check in with the website and search based on a craving, something specific I wanted to cook with, or a couple key ingredients. It could come up with a list pulled from those 14,000 recipes. I hoped that it would be a big help in the time of coronavirus, where I was trying to limit my trips to the grocery store and cook what I had on hand.
I started by opening Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook and cooking the asafetida recipes it helped me find. I made mung dal, eating it as a side with one meal, then stretching it into a soup with cabbage and yogurt for another. From the same book, I made carrots and peas with sesame seeds, where the powder is stirred in at the end with cumin, coriander and salt.
My wife Elisabeth, who tried both the soup and the veggies in one sitting declared it tasted "like the actual spices you'd get at a proper Indian restaurant." I smiled, took more credit than I deserved and realized that with very little effort, I'd already brought exciting new flavors and three new dishes into my kitchen.
Next, I made chicken stock because I needed some. I make stock all the time, but searching for a recipe in Eat Your Books gave me options and ideas. Just surveying the results, I could see what my favorite authors suggest, and balance that with what I felt like and what I had on hand. While it doesn't give quantities or the whole recipe, a list of ingredients are in among the results. With a quick scan of the results screen, I could do some cherry-picking of good ideas like Hugh Acheson's use of coriander seeds or Tom Colicchio's fondness for a nub of tomato paste.
