As you will know by now we are not a recipe site! Eat Your Books lets you search for recipes in your cookbooks by ingredients. It's unlikely anyone would want to search for recipes by basic ingredients such as oil, flour and sugar. Most people have these basics in their cupboard, so originally we decided not to include them, in order to get as many recipes indexed as possible. We revised this indexing practice and now index almost all ingredients but older indexed books will omit some ingredients. Always refer to the recipe in your cookbook to ensure you have the complete list of ingredients.
The list of store-cupboard ingredients that we used to exclude, unless they are a main ingredient of the dish or were in significant quantities, were: salt, pepper, baking soda, baking powder, cream of tartar, cornstarch/cornflour, cooking spray, water, butter, vegetable shortening, eggs, milk, all-purpose/plain flour, self rising/raising flour, granulated/white sugar, light-brown sugar, dark-brown sugar, confectioner's/icing sugar, vanilla extract/essence, olive oil, vegetable oil, canola oil, red and white wine vinegar, basic red and white wine, Dijon mustard, chicken/beef/vegetable stock, white and yellow onions, garlic, lemons.
More recently we have revised the rules and now index almost all ingredients You can check out the store-cupboard ingredient rules in our Indexing Manual.