Getting recipes out of screenshots, cookbooks and bookmarks

Five places, and none of them is where you plan

Count where your recipes actually live. Screenshots in your camera roll. Links saved in a browser or sent to yourself in a message. Two or three cookbooks with a page turned down. Cards in a tin in your mother's handwriting. A note file with the one you improvised and want again. Every one of those is a fine place to keep a recipe and a useless place to plan from, because you cannot search across them, scale them, or turn them into a shopping list.

The job is not to type everything up. It is to get the recipes you actually cook into one structured library, once, so that every later use of them is free. Three routes get them there: paste a URL, photograph the page, or type it in. Whichever you use, the last step is the same and it is the one people skip — look at the result before you save it.

Our Table Tonight has all three routes built in. This guide covers when each one is worth using, what it will and will not get right, and what to fix before saving.

Step one: triage before you import anything

Do not start at the top of the camera roll. Most saved recipes were saved on an impulse and will never be cooked, and importing them costs you the same effort as importing the ones you make every month — then buries the good ones in search results.

Go through what you have and sort it into three piles:

1. Cooked in the last year. These are the library. Import all of them, and do these first — the collection becomes useful the moment your actual repertoire is in it.
2. Meant to cook, still might. Import them in a second pass, or leave the link where it is until you have made it once.
3. Saved and forgotten. Leave them. If you never find yourself missing one, that was the right call.

A realistic first pile is twenty to forty recipes. That is an evening of work, not a project, and it is the whole difference between a planner you can use next week and one you keep meaning to fill in.

Step two: pick the route for each recipe

Paste a URL

For anything that exists on a website, this is the route. Paste the address into the import dialog and the app fetches the page in the background and pulls out the parts that make a recipe usable: the ingredients with their quantities and units, the prep and cook times, the number of servings and the method steps. It usually takes ten to thirty seconds, and you get a filled-in recipe form to check rather than a finished recipe.

What you are taking is the method: quantities, timings and steps. Leave the rest of the page where it is. The headnote about the writer's grandmother's kitchen and the photograph they styled and shot are the parts that are genuinely theirs, in a way that “300g flour” and “bake for 25 minutes” are not — so keep the link rather than the prose, and go back to their page when you want to read it or send it to someone.

Some sites block automated fetching outright. When that happens you are told so, and the dialog offers to open a blank form instead of leaving you guessing whether the link was wrong.

Photograph a page or a card

For cookbooks, magazine cuttings and recipe cards, take a picture. The app accepts JPEG, PNG, WEBP and PDF, and HEIC files straight from an iPhone — HEIC is converted to JPEG in your browser before anything is uploaded, so you do not have to convert it yourself. Any photo you later attach to the recipe is resized in the browser too. The limit is 10 MB per file, which a phone photo comfortably fits under.

Before it is sent you can mark parts of the image to leave out — the facing page, the advertisement, a caption in the margin — so the text recognition is only given the recipe. Doing that takes ten seconds and improves the result more than retaking the photo does.

Whatever you photograph, these help:

• Flatten the page and shoot straight down, not at an angle.
• Even light, no shadow from your own head, no flash glare on glossy paper.
• One recipe per photo. Two columns of unrelated text interleave badly.
• Fill the frame with the text. Detail matters more than the whole page fitting in.

Type it in

For the ones in your head, the ones on a card nothing can read, and the ones you have changed so much that the original is no longer what you cook — type them. It takes a few minutes and produces the cleanest record of the three, because every field is what you meant rather than what a machine guessed. This is also the honest answer for a family recipe you care about: worth doing properly once.

Step three: review the import before you save

An import is a starting point, not a finished recipe. Both routes drop you on the ordinary recipe form with the fields filled in, and it is quicker to fix things there than to find them wrong in three weeks with a shopping list built on them. Check these:

• Ingredient rows. Each ingredient should be its own row with the quantity in one field and the unit in another. A line that came through as free text — “2 large onions, finely sliced” sitting in the name field with no quantity — is worth splitting up.
• Prep and cook minutes. These decide the recipe's effort level, and a scrape that guessed or left them blank puts it in the wrong band.
• Servings. Everything scales from this number, so a wrong one is wrong every time you cook for a different-sized table.
• Steps. Skim for a step that has merged into its neighbour or lost a temperature.
• Oven temperature and unit. Check the recipe did not arrive at 180°F.

The structured ingredient rows are the part worth spending time on. They are what let the app scale a recipe from four servings to six without rewriting it, merge the onions from two different dinners into one line on the shopping list, and group that list by category so it follows the shop. A recipe whose ingredients are one block of text will display fine and do none of that.

Step four: tag allergens and times while it is fresh

Before you save, add the allergen tags. You are looking at the ingredient list anyway, and it takes about ten seconds. That is what lets the planner flag a conflict later, when the recipe lands on a day and someone at the table cannot eat sesame — an untagged recipe produces no warning, because there is nothing to compare against.

The same argument covers the prep-ahead note, if the recipe has one. If the dough needs to rest overnight or the beans need soaking, write it in the prep-ahead field now. That fact is on the page in front of you at this moment and will not be on the day you plan it.

What you end up with

One searchable library, in the same place as the planner. You can search it by name, narrow it by effort level, maximum time, dietary tag or allergen, put a recipe on a day, and let the shopping list come out of the week rather than being written again by hand.

Start with the twenty you actually cook. The tin of cards can wait for a winter evening.