2,000th book indexed

We have just indexed our 2,000th cookbook and we are heading towards half a million recipes. With lots of magazines and blogs now being indexed too, the recipe index on Eat Your Books just keeps getting more and more useful. Don't forget you can add any of the online recipes to your Bookshelf - you don't have to own the… read more

First blog indexed

We have now completed our first blog index - 1,099 recipes from the Simply Recipes blog by Elsie Bauer.  You can add the blog and recipes to your Bookshelf - every recipe has a Recipe online link back to the Simply Recipes site.  Another great feature on the blog recipes is that we can add the blogger's photos, which really enhances the… read more

More new developments

We put up a new release last night with another new feature.  You can now view all comments for recipes under the Notes tab for a book.  The total number of Notes (shown next to the speech bubble) includes all recipe notes. At the top of Notes we have also added back the EYB comments which got accidentally dropped in… read more

New developments on EYB

Many of you will be pleased that we have just released some much-requested features: Indexing of Magazines - we will shortly have the entire Cooks Illustrated collection indexed.   Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Cooking Lightand Delicious (UK) following soon.  Where a magazine recipe is attributed to an author we list that author so you will be able to include all recipes from a favorite author in your recipe… read more

400,000th recipe indexed

We reached another milestone this week when we indexed our 400,000th recipe on EYB.  I remember when we started EYB that the 100,000th recipes seemed a phenomenal amount.  But then we had just 15,000 cookbooks in the Library and now we have launched EYB in the UK, we should reach 100,000 in the next few months.  We now have (I… read more

And yet another Joy of Cooking gets indexed

We've just indexed the 1997 Revised Edition of Joy of Cooking, which contains 2,547 recipes (thanks to our indexer Tracey who labored on this one for weeks).  Since this is the third edition of the book we've indexed, the number of JofC recipes on EYB is 8,614 (2% of our total).  The book (in 31 different editions) is on 1,635 Bookshelves. … read more

Joan Nathan

Joan Nathan talks about how she unearths the stories she includes her books. The question I am most frequently asked is, "how do you find all the people with their stories for your books?"  And secondly, "how do you get the recipes?"  I answer that writing a cookbook is like going fishing.  Sometimes you find nothing.  Sometimes you reel in a… read more

Our biggest cookbook so far

It may not be the heaviest or even the largest cookbook we have indexed but Larousse Gastronomique is certainly the winner in terms of number of recipes.  We have just added the index and there are 3,880 recipes.  We had to add quite a few new ingredients for this book, notably a few songbirds such as lark, thrush and warbler (the French do… read more

J M Hirsch

J M Hirsch on Cookbooks as Inspiration. My job makes it hard not to be a little jaded about cookbooks. As food editor for The Associated Press, I get sent virtually every cookbook published, sometimes several times (when the PR people aren't all that on the ball). The result is a tidal wave of recipes clamoring to be consumed. Some are obvious… read more

What makes a cookbook terrific or terrible?

Susie has written a great article today in Publishers Weekly, titled "10 Things Every Cookbook Publisher Should Know".  Susie receives stacks of new cookbooks every week and she road-tests and reviews many of them.  So she really knows what works and what doesn't. read more

Susie’s picks for best cookbooks of 2010

Our own Susie Chang was on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday this morning with some of her picks of the best cookbooks this year.  The full list is on the NPR website and it's also worth listening to the on-air story. We will again this year be compiling a best of the best list of 2010 list, for which we will be tracking down… read more

How many cookbooks do we need?

Josh Ozersky writes in the current issue of Time magazine that no-one needs more than about four cookbooks.  What nonsense!  Nancy Baggett, author of numerous wonderful cookbooks, has responded on her blog and asked for comments. read more

Keep up to date with EYB

We are now posting details of newly indexed books on our Twitter and Facebook feeds, so if you would like to know immediately what new books have been indexed, subscribe by clicking the links on the Community page.  We will also be posting the links to Buzz features - news from the world of cookbooks. read more

Molly Stevens

Molly Stevens Why Recipes Don't Work... We caught up with the one and only Molly Stevens--author, co-author, or editor of many cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winning All about Braising.  She's also a contributing editor at Fine Cooking and teaches cooking classes throughout the country.  She provided us with a rare insight--from a cooking teacher's perspective--on why cookbooks can only… read more

Some features you may be missing

In developing the new website, there were some features that we didn't have time to incorporate.  They are however on our to-do list so you should see them improved and back on EYB soon. Friends - we are developing a much-improved social networking feature for EYB and Friends will be part of that.  We have retained your Friends data so when we… read more

New version of EYB is here at last

It's taken us longer than we would like but we are really happy with the end result - we hope you are too!  We have a great team of developers who have incorporated your feedback since we launched.  There are a lot more improvements we want to make over the next few months but the basic structure we have now… read more

Monica Bhide

Monica Bhide looks at how family recipes change over time... This morning I was making a lentil soup for my family, almost exactly the way my grandmother, in India,  taught me decades ago. Or so I first thought. Her recipe used six tablespoons of butter,  onions, garlic, red lentils, about eight different spices, loads of cilantro and a touch of… read more

Matt and Ted Lee

Matt Lee and Ted Lee talk about their beloved grandmother... Elizabeth Maxwell, our late grandmother, had a profound influence on our cooking, though you'll have to banish any images of an aproned Southern Grandmother laboring all day at the stove, stirring her collards and hushing her puppies. Gran, as we called her, was a thoroughly modern Yankee, wearer of short… read more

The Observer’s Top 10 Cookbooks of All Time

The list is now up at sister paper The Guardian's website. And the top 10 are: 1. The French Menu Cookbook by Richard Olney2. French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David3. The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden4. The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater5. Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson & Lindsey Bareham6. English Food by Jane Grigson7. Thai Food by David Thompson8. The Classic Italian Cookbook by Marcella Hazan9. Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop10. Great Dishes of… read more

Best 50 cookbooks of all time?

The Guardian has today listed the first installment of the best 50 cookbooks of all time, as chosen by The Observer's Food Monthly. The top 10 will be published in this Sunday's Observer. See how many you have, and how many you disagree with. Inevitably the skew is British though there are nine Americans in the list and one Australian. Rather… read more

Essential maintenance

We will have to take the site down this morning, hopefully for not longer than 3 hours, for some essential upkeep of the site.  It should be back up by 3pm EST. Once the new version of the site goes live in the next couple of weeks, such downtime will not be necessary.  Apologies if you needed to use EYB during this… read more

13 ways of looking at a cherry tomato…

...well, maybe not quite that many (with apologies to Wallace Stevens).  It takes forever, it seems, for the Sungold cherry tomatoes to ripen.  We started them in March, shuttled them in and out of the house during the frosty nights of April, gently forked them into the ground in May and watched for 8 weeks! as those tiny green marbles… read more

100,000 cookbooks on EYB members’ Bookshelves

There are now more than 100,000 cookbooks on our members' Bookshelves.  The number of members owning each book varies from 550 for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One down to lots of books just owned by one member.  You can check out who else owns your cookbooks by clicking Other Bookshelves under book details.  Then you can look at all the… read more

Congratulations to Susie!

Our own Susie Chang has just been awarded 3rd place in the biennial MFK Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing (administered by Les Dames d'Escoffier International).  The story so honored was last year's Gather Ye Squash Blossoms While Ye May on NPR.  Congratulations Susie - a great honor! read more

EYB Library now 79,000 books

The import of books data from around the world is now complete, a total of nearly 79,000 cookbooks and books on food from the USA & Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  So you should now be able to add most of your books to your Bookshelf.  Any you find that we don't have, import the ISBNs using… read more
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