Running into a recipe paywall

The EYB Library is a wonderful search tool to find a recipe that meets all of your requirements, whether they are for particular ingredients, meeting a dietary restriction, or excluding a certain type of dish. It can be exciting to discover a recipe that is exactly what you are looking for, and you squeal with delight (or is that just me?) when you see that it’s available online. You click on the link….only to end up at a paywall. It’s disappointing, to say the least. 

You may ask “why does EYB even link to items that are behind a paywall?” Generally, we try not to do so, but some circumstances make excluding the recipe difficult. One of those circumstances is when a site that used to be free of charge enacts a paywall, like what happened to many NYT recipes. Many members had indexed recipes, and it would be unfair to them to simply remove the links, since those members had added recipe notes and reviews, and we don’t want them to lose this information.

In addition, we had several NYT columns we had been indexing – mainly because we have complete recipe indexes for those authors – Mark Bittman, Melissa Clark, Yotam Ottolenghi, Dorie Greenspan and David Tanis. Again, taking those down wouldn’t be fair for members for the reasons stated above and also because those columns represent an important part of those authors’ recipe output.

Websites sometimes change their links without any notice (I’m looking at you Food Network), so that when you click on an online recipe link, it will redirect you to a basic landing page or give you a “file not found” type of error. If you have this issue, please inform us and we will attempt to fix the link or remove it. Magazines and websites also sometimes remove recipes for reasons that remain a mystery to everyone, and it is impossible for us to know when that occurs. Again, if you encounter a dead-end link, please send an email to info@eatyourbooks.com and we will attempt to correct it or remove the link. 

We will continue to link to free websites that require a registration, like Better Homes & Gardens. These sites offer their recipes at no cost other than a username and password. Some sites with paywalls also offer a certain number of free views per month. If you visit a link to such a site, it would be a good idea to print that recipe to pdf and make a personal note to indicate that you have saved the recipe. 

As always, we welcome member suggestions on how we can improve our site. We are considering ways to inform members when a recipe is linked to a subscription only site. Please feel free to offer ideas – we love to hear from our members!