Forum

Okay, I may be adding to this problem but I am thoroughly confused as to how EYB codes ingredients with multiple names. For example, the first three ingredients in First Food: A Taste of India's Biodiversity by Sunita Narain and Vibha Varshney and Kaushik Dasgupta are all recipes under the ingredient "makhana". Note that the cookbook is arranged by ingredients. However, the first recipe uses "ground makhana" while the other two use "foxnuts" i.e. makhana. Why isn't it "ground makhana" and "makhana" or "ground fox nuts" and "fox nuts"? How do I search and pick up all three recipes?

Secondly, the third recipe requests "muskmelon seeds" which is coded as "cantaloupe seeds". Muskmelons include but are not limited to cantaloupe. So why is a term narrower than the recipe requests used? (See http://web.extension.ill.../dmp/palette/070729.html if you don't believe me.)

mjes, the book you're inquiring about was indexed by an EYB member. Without access to the book, EYB staff are only able to correct or question the types of obvious errors or omissions that jump out at us during review. We have no way of knowing, for example, that the book is arranged by ingredient. When we see 'makhana' listed in one recipe and 'foxnuts' in the next, we would assume the indexer has listed what the recipes call those ingredients as dictated in our indexing guidelines. If you'd like to send me a scan of those three recipes, I'll be glad to adjust the ingredients lists accordingly. Nevertheless, since we've associated 'makhana' as a variation of 'foxnuts' (ditto, 'ground makhana' is a variation of 'ground foxnuts') in the EYB Ingredients database, a search for either term will retrieve the same 6 recipes in this book that call for "makhana" or "foxnuts". 

I've swapped out 'muskmelon seeds' for 'cantaloupe seeds' in the third recipe; again, our reviewer had no way of knowing what was actually called for in the recipe, so thanks for pointing out the error.

Thanks. That makes perfect sense and gives me guidance on how I should code ingredients especially when specifying a new ingredient.

A related issue that a note posted by another user made me find. I would expect that if I look a recipes and filter them by the ingredient "gelatin" and the nutrition "vegan", I should get no recipes. Instead I get 90 recipes - some contain no gelatin but rather use agar-agar, kanten or other vegan gelatine substitutes. I would not expect to see these because they do not contain gelatin. Others contain gelatine or gelatine products; I would not expect these to be marked vegan. Some contain pectin which I have even more trouble seeing how it was picked up as gelatine ... but is legitimately vegan.

I realize that this is not a very high error rate - less than 90 out of circa 19,500 gelatine recipes although nearly 350 are labeled vegetarian. Is it helpful to point these errors out or are the at a rate that is simply to be expected? Although it may not seem like it I honestly don't expect perfection.

I'm not sure I can answer all of the gelatin questions, but I can see that there are quite a few recipes with gelatin in the recipe title even though agar or other vegan ingredient is used. So those recipes are correctly tagged as vegan and still showing up in a text search for gelatin. Certainly there are some mistagged as vegan that could be corrected that do contain gelatin.

That helps - gelatin in the title explains many that confused me.

Chefdickey: try using the search filters (Rh side of screen) rather than "chicken pie" in the search box.. The filters allow you to search by key ingredient, dish type, and course (amongst others). Ijust ran a search in the EYB library using the filters for ingredient "chicken"; baking:"pies. tarts, pastries" and course" main course".. that delivered over 2,300 recipes for chicken pies of one type of another (including pot pies!): https://www.eatyourbooks...amp;f_course=Main+course. There is a how to in the help section on searching tips & tricks: https://support.eatyourb...ing-the-most-from-search. Welcome to EYB!

Chefdicky69 - welcome to EYB! We have lots of help available as debkellie outlines. In addition to the Help pages, have you looked through the tutorials? They are accessed from the green Need Help? button at bottom right (not available on phones). Tutorial 3: Using search filters would be relevant here.

The search filters are a better way of finding the most results for a recipe type because they match to the database tag whereas the search box is a word search. Your chicken pies example is a good one - many chicken pies will not have the word pies in the title, especially when they are from non-English speaking countries. Here are some examples of European chicken pies from the Library - spanakopita, pasties, strudel, pithivier, tourtière, timbale and more are examples of pies that do not have pie or pies in the name. A word search would not show those but using the recipe type filter would.

Chefdicky69, the reason you didn't find that "Chicken pies" recipe from your book is that the word search in EYB is an exact search, so entering "chicken pie" (singular) only finds recipes in which that specific phrase appears in the recipe title. If you enter "chicken pies" (plural), you'll find a completely different set of recipes in which the plural phrase appears! So it's much better to use the EYB Filters, combined with a less restrictive word search if desired, as debkellie and Jane pointed out.