Forum

I'm a new member, delighted to find EYB. I'll have much more to say later, but one thing occurs to me straightaway: is there some way to get to the list of "official" ingredients other than by blind typing? I'm thinking in particular of all the funky names for different cuts of beef, so searching for something to do with, say "silverside" (yes, I'm in New Zealand) becomes a matter of negotiation between Wikipedia and EYB.

Ideally, I'd like to see ingredients organized in categories, so that when I search for "beef roast" I get a variety of hits that wouldn't necessarily match a straight text search.

Welcome to EYB upstill.    The search box is there as a quick search - type in any word and it will find any occurence of it - we look first in the recipe name then in the ingredients list - so any recipe that has that ingredient in the recipe name will be listed first as it's more likely to be a major ingredient.

To get a more refined search you need to use the 'Only Show' filter on the right hand side.   So in the example you gave you'd select  Ingredients/Meat, Poultry & Game/Beef/Joints - then to get the cut you wanted you'd type 'silverside' in the search box.    You can find out more on this at How to narrow down your seach using Only Show

We've tried to link ingredients together that are the same but have different names in different countries - for instance there is a meat called girello that is linked to pickled silverside - which is apparently the same thing.   So if you search using one name it will find all other recipes that use the other - same with zucchini/courgette and eggplant/aubergine.   We welcome all feedback from members around the world who can update us on any variations we've missed.

The filter list is the closest you can get to the complete list, which is over 9,500 ingredients.  We felt we couldn't list all of these, it would be too hard to use, so we had a huge job of categorising all those ingredients into the ingredient headings.  

I'm familiar with silverside - as I live in NZ, eaten it but never cooked it.  I think it should be linked to corned beef - are you able to confirm?  

My best guess is that corned beef entered the U.S. food culture by way of the NY Delis, a.k.a. Jewish delis.  Back then, both the proprietors and the majority of Jewish customers would have kept kosher, and anything in the hind quarters of a cow is not a kosher cut of beef.

robm, you'll find a very succint answer to these questions in this post on chowhound.  Scroll about 3/4 down the page to a response by tyrusg that begins what seems like a very solid answer.  Then continue reading through the next several comments to the comment by cresyd.  Lots of interesting insights!  I'm sure if I asked my own Brooklyn-raised Jewish Bubbe, I'd get a different but equally opinionated answer, haha.

robm - according to my wonderfully titled reference book 'Meat Cuts and Muscle Foods', silverside of beef is the semitendinosus muscle, which is located laterally in the hip, and has a natural, silvery seam of epimysium along which to define the start of the English silverside of beef.  So it's definitely not the same as US brisket which is located at the front underside of the cow, the pectoral muscles over the sternum.  Too much information?

That was like some weird mashup of Alton Brown and ER.

An interesting question, as the ensuing discussion highlights. Meat in general and beef in particular pose a real problem for semantic search. Sometimes you call for "beef chuck" because you want that exact cut, and sometimes you'd be happy with any kind of stew beef, including the miscellaneous trimmings I've got from my homekill cattle-beast in the freezer. Mark Bittman, for example, often does the great favour (see, I AM in New Zealand!) of listing a range of alternative cuts for a given dish. It would be nice to have such categories available in searches and in recipes.

I agree and I really wish we had stuck to our guns on this one with our original developers (who we ended up firing).  Our original spec had alternative ingredients but the developers said it was over-complicating things and in the interest of ever getting the website finished we conceded that one.  So the issue if we now add alternative ingredients to the ingredients list is that we have 370,000 recipes already indexed which don't list alternatives.  I think the only way to deal with this would be to make it a wiki that members could add to as they wish.  It's on our to-do list!