What are Personal Recipes, and how do I use them?

Personal Recipes lets you add your own recipes to your Bookshelf: the clippings, the gifts, the handwritten cards. They appear in your searches alongside your cookbooks, and only you can see them.

Because they're private, nobody is grading your indexing. But the search filters only work on what you've filled in, so a recipe you categorize the way we categorize cookbook recipes is a recipe you can find again in three years.

Adding one

1. Open Personal Recipes from the My Bookshelf menu.
2. Fill in the form. Your cursor starts in Recipe title, and Tab moves you from field to field.
3. In the category and ingredient fields, start typing and a list of matches appears. Press Enter to take the one you want, and click the (x) beside anything you picked by mistake.
4. Click Save & New to save it and open a blank form for the next one.

Every field on the form has a ? beside it that explains the field in place. What follows is the longer version.

What goes in each field

Recipe title

1. Capitalize the first word, proper nouns, and ingredients that carry a capital in our ingredient list, like Parmesan and Gorgonzola. Nothing else. "Grilled fillet steak with the creamiest white beans."
2. If the recipe has both an English and a foreign title, put the English one first: "Tuscan polenta crostini (Crostini di polenta Toscana)."
3. Use accents if the source does, and don't if it doesn't. On a Mac, hold a letter key down to get its accented forms. On Windows, press Windows key + full stop and switch to the symbols tab. Watch where you put them: "pâte" is pastry and "pâté" is meat paste.

Recipe types

What kind of dish it is. The recipe types and book categories list has every type with the dishes that belong to it.

1. A dish can take more than one. Egg salad is Egg dishes and Salads. Chicken and rice casserole is Rice dishes and Casseroles, stews & one-pot meals.
2. Plain meat, poultry, and fish main dishes, the baked and poached and sautéed ones, often have no recipe type at all.

Ethnicities

1. Pick the most specific one that fits. Spicy Szechuan chicken is Chinese, not Asian.
2. Some dishes carry a default: yakitori is Japanese, gumbo is Cajun & Creole. The recipe types list gives these.
3. If a place is in the name, use it. "Greek lima bean dip" is Greek.
4. "Latin American" means both South American and Central American. A US city or state means North American.
5. Dishes eaten everywhere, like omelets, pizza, kebabs, and quiche, get no ethnicity unless the recipe names a place: "Pizza Napoletana," "Moroccan chicken kebabs."

Courses

1. Follow the author. "Serves 4 as an appetizer" means Appetizers / starters.
2. Meat, poultry, fish, and pasta dishes all take Main course, plus anything else the author indicates.
3. Anything you wouldn't serve on its own gets no course: sauces, doughs, frostings, fillings, dressings, marinades.

Occasions

1. If the author mentions one, use it. "I like to make this for parties" is Dinner parties / entertaining.
2. A season, holiday, or event in the name counts: "Spring vegetable soup," "Halloween cake."
3. Serves 10–12 or more is Cooking for a crowd.
4. Cooking ahead means most or all of the work can be done in advance. Most slow-cooker recipes qualify.
5. Skip Seasonal. It applies to books, not recipes.

Nutrition

Special diets and nutritional features. We don't set nutritional standards ourselves; we follow what the author says.

1. Add one only if it's in the recipe name ("Low-fat dressing"), the author mentions it, or the chapter is dedicated to it.
2. Mark Vegetarian when the recipe has no meat, fish, poultry, or product of animal slaughter. That includes meat and fish stock, anchovies, bacon bits, lard, fish sauce, oyster sauce, Worcestershire sauce, rennet, and gelatin.
3. Mark Vegan when it also has no eggs, dairy, or honey. Everything vegan is also vegetarian.
4. Only mark Vegetarian on things that could have contained meat: appetizers, canapés, snacks, breakfast items, main courses, side dishes. Drinks, desserts, breads, dressings, and afternoon tea items don't need it.
5. Skip General health conditions. It applies to books, not recipes.

Ingredients

Type at least three characters and the first 30 matching ingredients appear. Scroll to the one you want, or keep typing until it reaches the top, then press Enter. Check that it moved out of the box and into the list above with an (x) beside it, because until it does that it isn't added.

1. The database holds more than 70,000 ingredients, so search properly before deciding one is missing. If there's genuinely no match, take the closest one.
2. For your own recipes you can enter everything, or only what you'd search on. Nobody else sees them, so it's your call.
3. Fruit and vegetables are entered as plurals, under the generic name rather than the cultivar.
4. Bittersweet and semisweet chocolate are both dark chocolate. Fresh citrus juice and zest are indexed as the fruit: lemons, limes.
5. Herbs default to fresh, with the dried version listed separately. Oregano is the exception and means the dried herb.
6. Spices default to ground, with the whole version listed separately. Ginger is the exception and means fresh root, with ground ginger separate.
7. Regional and spelling variations are linked to a master ingredient and show in square brackets: zucchini [courgette]. Pick it and both names display.

Accompaniments

Other recipes that go with this one. Type any word from the title, like "chicken," and your matching recipes appear.

1. Only another Personal Recipe can be an accompaniment, and it has to be added first. For anything else, use Notes.
2. An accompaniment is served alongside, in the same course. A side dish with a main, a sauce with a dessert.
3. Something served before or after isn't an accompaniment, even if the author put them in the same menu.

Photos

You can upload your own, and only you will see them. JPG, JPEG, or PNG.

Source

Free text, to help you find the physical recipe. "Kitchen file 1, desserts." "Pink recipe box." "Kitchen folder, page 23." Whatever matches how you actually store things.

Online URL

If the recipe is on a website, put the address here and you can open it straight from your Bookshelf. If you'd rather share the recipe with other members, add it with the Bookmarklet instead.

Bookmarks

Your own bookmarks, if you've set any up. See Using Bookmarks.

Notes

Free text for anything: when you last made it, who gave it to you, what you'd change.

Editing or deleting one

Click the Personal Recipes filter on the right, or under the Filter menu on a phone, and find the recipe. Click the gray pencil beside its title to reopen the form, then Save your changes or click Delete.