Our journey begins with the release of Cookery Collections, a website for cookbook owners to easily look up recipes within their owned cookbooks. It’s a search engine for printed books and it makes it easy to find recipes by name or ingredient such as ‘the one with artichokes in it’.
Cookbooks reveal much about a household such as their diet and taste preferences, but to us they tell tell a bigger story. Cookbooks inspire us, they give us a glimpse into cultures and places. They tantalize us with their beautiful dishes of rich colours and exotic flavours. Cookery authors educate us with ingredient combinations and cooking techniques that enhance or even transform the original whole food flavours. Cookbooks create conversation and the stories within are cherished. One of our objectives at Open Food is to support this medium and help it flourish.
Why we began with Cookbooks
Cookery publishing is an exhaustive process that for some can take years to produce the final book that you hold in your hand. This writer once participated in the design and printing of a set of four cookbooks for a celebrated restaurant group in Vancouver. I saw first hand how much work went into the selection of recipes, their corresponding ingredients and the preparation of each dish. The chef’s worked tirelessly to ensure that each dish could be replicated by home cooks regardless of their skill and confidence in the kitchen.
We chose cookbooks as our first feature release because people trust them and love owning them. The recipes within have been validated and tested prior to publishing and provide consumers with confidence.
Ingredients within cookbooks are the building blocks of meals. They’re what we as home cooks seek and shop for to create the dishes that inspire us. As we build upon our initial release of Cookery Collections we hope to provide more insight on the whole foods that are contained within these treasured books so that people can create their own flavour combinations, dishes and stories.
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