Collective recipe index?

March 28, 2006 10:55 AM

Is there a website that contains a recipe directory for printed cookbooks?

I own lots of cookbooks. It's annoying to have to look through each individiual index, however, when I'm looking for a recipe for a common dish. Is there a website, or other service, that has a searchable collection of what recipes can be found in what cookbooks? (Note, I'm not looking for the recipes themselves, but instead a collective, searchable index.)

posted by chefscotticus to Food & Drink (2 answers total)

If there is, I've never been able to find it. And sadly you'll find that the majority of publishers that produce cookbooks don't allow "Search Inside" on Amazon, either.

What I've done is taken whatever text I could scrounge online and stored it in the Notes section of my recipe database program. This lets me search the index of maybe 40% of my cookbooks in one fell swoop.

Have you thought about scanning the index pages and OCRing them?
posted by bcwinters at 11:12 AM on March 28, 2006

Response by poster: No on the OCRing, but it's a good thought. The other idea I've had is to do a Google Book search -- the problem is finding a way to limit results to only cookbooks....
posted by chefscotticus at 11:19 AM on March 28, 2006