Online recipe storage

July 3, 2009 9:24 AM

Help me preserve my family's culinary heritage! Help me find a webapp for storing my Dad's favorite recipes.

My Dad has always been a good cook and over the years he's accumulated hundreds of recipes that he has organized on 3x5 cards. He's recently retired and has expressed interest in converting these recipes to an electronic form.

What I'm looking for is some kind of recipe manager webapp with a nice interface so that he can enter recipes. The idea being that family memebers could access the recipes online. The solution I'm looking for could be a service (pay or free), or could be an app that I install on my own web host. Some sort of export (XML, CSV, plain text) is pretty much mandatory, and some sort of multiple user system would be nice to have.

I know about sites like allrecipes.com, but we don't really want the recipes of others, we want to store and share our own recipes.

Does anyone have any ideas of software that fits the bill? My family and future generations thank you!

posted by perrce to computers & internet (8 comments total)

epicurious.com has a Recipe Box feature that allows you to add your own recipes, as well as other features like converting multiple recipes into shopping lists. I generally like the interface of epicurious.com. They are trying really hard to be the social-food-networking site. I'm not sure if similar featues are on allrecipes.com, as that site is broken for me right now. I also like the interface of nibbledish.

Here is a recipe manager program that is open-source, and exports information to a web-friendly format, but I haven't used it and don't how it works..
posted by jabberjaw at 9:41 AM on July 3

There is a Drupal module for recipe storage.
posted by movicont at 9:42 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]

Evernote would be a good solution for this. You can either setup a shared account between all of your family members or have individual accounts and share recipes individually.
posted by zerokey at 9:51 AM on July 3

I like Tastebook. I'm tough to please because I'm an interaction designer. So believe me when I say they have a nice interface for entering and managing recipes. And they have optional social features too: you can access recipes added by other users and a number of magazines (Gourmet, Bon Apetit, Epicurious, etc.).

They'll also let you print a book of your own recipes (which would come in handy in case of your online resource going belly-up -- sorry, but it had to be said).
posted by nadise at 11:18 AM on July 3

I use google documents for this, which is pretty bare bones, and its arguable whether its a nice interface or not. It's certainly simple anyway. I can browse the recipes from any web-connected machine, including my iphone which is handy when I'm at the grocery store and I suddenly decide to cook something, I have the ingredients list right there! I can also share the documents with others, and set their sharing to read only or read/write depending on their level of trustworthiness. Its stored as plain text instead of some crazy format, and integration with google would make it simple to copy and email recipes to others.
posted by Joh at 11:32 AM on July 3

Scan the recipes and then blog them, just post each scanned image one at a time on a free blog like WordPress and then the blog go peacefully into the ether.

It's easy to add tags and categories, so you get search for free.

Don't forget the attribution (and other details like dates, places, unique ingredients) that will let posterity know where they came from.

Then send us the link so we can start cooking some of them!
posted by foooooogasm at 2:03 PM on July 3

I really like the blog idea. He could capture his memories and stories and personal tips for each one. Great project, only takes a few minutes every day or whatever time he wants to put in. Everyone could easily see it, there are so many other positives to this.
posted by raisingsand at 4:16 PM on July 3

I second suggestion of Tastebook by nadise.
Only complaint is, they don't have a standalone application that could sit on your machine (if you want to) and syncs recipes online. My argument for an application is, just in case, tastebook sells the business then you lose everything. Having local application makes sure that you have recipes stored locally and if you wish, you can always gift the recipes as book.
posted by zaxour at 12:06 AM on July 4