A couple of months ago, I found some recipes in a favorite cookbook that called 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. however, when I found some, I forgot which recipe it was in, and spent an hour before bed digging through the same cookbook to find the recipes again; It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t a particularly efficient use of my time.
In that hour, however, I remembered a website I signed up for a few years ago and then couldn’t use. the site, eat your books, is niche, but if you cook a lot and have a lot of cookbooks, it’s great. As a quick indicator of usefulness, imagine stacking all your cookbooks in a pile on the floor. if that stack is up to your waist, eating your books will probably come in handy.
You are reading: Eat your books review
To start, you tell it all the cookbooks you own (the company’s database has indexed almost 10,000 of them with 1.5 million recipes) and then you search for the recipe you want to cook or the ingredients you need. you want to use. the results page gives you recipes for the books you own, usually with the page number. From there, narrow down your options, pick your winner, take the book off the shelf, and store it in your cookbook holder. when I plugged in “asafetida”, it found not only the recipes it was looking for, but also 21 other recipes in two of my other books.
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I signed up for a subscription. a premium membership costs $3 per 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 in front of my bookshelves one night, I plugged in my books and learned that I have 68 cookbooks with 14,447 recipes. there were a couple of books he didn’t recognize, but those were on the dark side.
He also knows cooking magazines and websites. impressively, the cooks pictorial’s entire catalog is there, along with over 10 years of food & amp; wine and bon appetit, thousands of recipes from the new york times (from the columnist) and websites like food52. to varying degrees, and sometimes limited, you can also filter by criteria such as type of cooking (grilled, one-pot meals) or ease of preparation.
My hope was that eating your books would break me out of the rut where I only use a few favorite recipes from a few favorite books. Instead of zeroing in on those when I was hungry, I would log onto the website and search based on a craving, something specific I wanted to cook with, or a couple of key ingredients. could generate a list extracted from those 14,000 recipes. I was hoping it would be a big help in the time of coronavirus, when I was trying to limit my trips to the grocery store and cook what I had on hand.
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I started by opening madhur jaffrey’s instant indian cookbook and cooking the asafetida recipes he helped me find. I made mung dal, ate it as a side for one meal, and then made 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 at the end with cumin, coriander, and salt.
my wife elisabeth, who tasted the soup and vegetables in one sitting, stated that it tasted “like the real spices you’d get in a proper indian restaurant”. I smiled, took more credit than I deserved, and realized that with very little effort, I had already brought exciting new flavors and three new dishes to my kitchen.
Next, I made chicken broth because I needed some. I make broth all the time, but looking up a recipe on eat your books gave me options and ideas. just by looking at the results, I was able to see what my favorite authors are suggesting and balance it with what I felt and what I had on hand. while it doesn’t provide quantities or the full recipe, the output includes a list of ingredients. With a quick glance at the results screen, I was able to pick out some good ideas, like hugh acheson’s use of coriander seeds or tom colicchio’s fondness for a piece of tomato paste.
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