Import Recipes in Your Units, with Your Tags

I cook in grams. Most recipes on the internet are written in cups. Every time I imported one, the same three things happened afterwards: I converted the cups to grams, I added the tags I use to find things later, and I scaled it to the number of people I was actually feeding.

Doing that once is fine. Doing it for every recipe is a chore, and it's the kind of chore that means half your collection is tagged properly and the other half isn't.

So I built import preferences. You set them once in your profile, and every recipe you import comes back already adjusted.

What you can set

There are four settings, and each one is optional:

  • Units. Original, Metric or Imperial. Metric converts quantities, oven temperatures and pan sizes, and turns cup and spoon measures of dry goods into grams using typical densities (a cup of flour is not a cup of sugar). Counts like 2 eggs and vague amounts like "a pinch" are left alone.
  • Add tags. Fills in the recipe's tags. If you give it a list of your own tags, it only applies tags from that list, and only the ones that fit. That is the useful part: every import ends up tagged with the words you actually search by, not whatever the model felt like that day. Leave the list empty and it suggests a few instead.
  • Substitute for my diet. Swaps ingredients that conflict with your saved diet, allergens or dislikes, and keeps a note of what the original was.
  • Servings. Scales every quantity to the number you pick, from 1 to 24. If the source doesn't say how many it serves, it's skipped.

What a substitution looks like

Since the result is a plain Cooklang file, a substitution is just text you can read and edit. If you avoid dairy, a line that called for butter comes back like this:

---
title: Pasta al forno
servings: 4
tags: [dinner, italian]
---

Stir in @olive oil{40%ml}(instead of 50 g butter) and cook until soft.

The note in parentheses is there so you can see what changed and undo it with a keystroke if the swap is wrong. Check substitutions yourself, especially if you have a real allergy. They come from a model, and a model can be confidently wrong.

How it works, and what it can't do

After a recipe is converted to Cooklang, one extra model call applies your settings. It doesn't rewrite the recipe. It proposes small find-and-replace edits, and the result goes through checks before it's kept: the recipe has to still parse, the number of paragraphs has to be the same, and the set of ingredients can't change unless you asked for substitutions. If any check fails, you get the unadjusted recipe, which is the same thing you'd have had without the feature.

I went with edits instead of a full rewrite because full rewrites shorten recipes. An edit can't quietly delete a paragraph.

A few limits worth knowing:

  • It applies to link, text and photo imports on the web and in the apps. It does not apply to batch imports from Paprika, Mela and similar.
  • It's a fixed set of options, not free text. For anything more open-ended, CookBot in Cook Pro can edit a recipe for you.
  • It doesn't change recipes you already have. Import again to apply new settings.
  • Volume-to-weight conversions are approximate. For baking, look twice.

Where to find it

Import preferences are included in Cook Basic (€4.99/month) and Cook Pro. Accounts that were grandfathered into free sync don't get it, because it costs me a model call on every import. That's why it sits on the paid plans.

Set it up under Profile, then Edit, then Import preferences. The step-by-step guide covers each setting, and if you want substitutions to work, set your diet, allergens and dislikes first.

I'd like to hear what's missing, especially tags and units where it gets things wrong. Reply to any email from me or write to [email protected].

Alex