Finally: a cookbook recipe review database

December 10, 2010 at 12:48 pm (Cookbook reviews)

For a long time I’ve thought that it would be great if there was some centralized location on the internet where you could see all the reviews of a particular cookbook, or even better, of each recipe in a cookbook.   That way you could see if there are errors in a recipe, or if a recipe has simply bombed over and over. It seems that the idea has finally caught on.  Heidi Swanson has created a 101cookbooks library where you can add reviews of a cookbook or a particular recipe in a cookbook.  I also recently came across http://www.cookbookrecipedatabase.com/.  Although it doesn’t have very many cookbooks added so far, and the search function is impressively broken, the site seems to be going in the right direction.

Once enough people start using these sites, it would be really cool if they would use them for collaborative recipe filtering.  Although an average rating is helpful, it doesn’t take into account people’s unique tastes.  These rating sites could help personalize the search results by comparing your ratings to those of other users.  The system could identify users that seem to give similar ratings to you.  Then you could chat with those users directly to get ideas for new cookbooks, or the system could simply suggest some other recipes you would probably like.

Just found another website:  http://www.eatyourbooks.com/.  The purpose of the site is to give you away to search your own cookbooks for recipes, but you can also write comments on specific recipes, and see other peoples’ comments.  The interface is a bit clunky.  There’s no way to view just the recipes that have comments.  You have to scroll through all the recipes in the cookbook looking for the “comment” icon.

Let me know if you know of any other cookbook recipe review websites, other than the three I’ve mentioned above.

The 101 cookbooks has both of my Peter Berley cookbooks listed on the site, but not many comments yet.  There’s also a rating but no comments for Buddha’s Table, reviews for Isa Moskowitz’s cookbooks, Jack Bishop’s Complete Italian Vegetarian Kitchen, McDermott’s Real Vegetarian Thai, and Rebecca Wood’s The Splendid Grain.