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I adore Diana Henry's recipes and use them a lot.  But I find I am not using her book, A Bird in the Hand nearly as much as I'd like to because I find the index really unhelpful.  It is a book of chicken recipes and a large proportion of the recipes listed in the index begin with the word chicken!  You can't search it for chicken thighs, breasts, whole bird or anything useful like that.  In fact you can't really search it for other ingredients either - it's really just an alphabetical list of recipe names.

I feel sure I am not the only one to find this frustrating and wonder if anyone has made an alternative, functional index for this book?????

I'm confused by your question. The EYB index does exactly what you want - the chicken ingredients are listed as thighs, breasts, whole chicken and every other ingredient is also indexed (excluding some store-cupboard ingredients). So why isn't EYB providing the "alternative, functional index" that you need?

Sorry - I am not sure if I understand the question correctly - but isn't it what EYB is all about?

I.e. you can go to the book page and since it's been indexed, search it for ingredients such as chicken thighs, or whatever you wish? Just click on the "search this book for Recipes" link at the top to see the search expression appear in the search box, then type whatever you want to search afterwards

For example 155931 "Bird in the Hand" chicken thighs or 155931 "Bird in the Hand" whole chicken

Ahahah we replied at the same time  - great minds! :) :) 

SWS - not sure what you mean by "index really unhelpful" - do you mean EYB's index (which by default is book order), or the actual book's index...? Searching in EYB is designed to make it easier.. click the book title, click "search this book for recipes" ; add the search term you'd like , eg: "thighs" into the search bar; then "enter", and you get 40 recipes, you can narrow that further either by using EYB filters (eg: ingredients you want to use) or by adding the ingredient name into the search bar in addition to "thighs" .. eg: thighs smoked paprika and you get 2 recipes.... you'll soon get the hang of it!

I wonder if SWS is referring to searching the actual index at the back of the book as opposed to searching on EYB.  I have the book and nothing is listed under "thighs" or "breasts" or "whole bird" in the index.

Much as I like DH, I do find the indexing in all her actual books to be rather odd.

I agree. The index in this book is even more idiosyncratic than her others. Based on my prior notes, it is arranged by cooking methods such as braise or sauté, which are open to interpretation. What I thought of as braising was categorized as sautéing. Pretty sure I used EYB's book order to find the recipe.