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Two phrases come to mind reading this string .. the first is "Can of Worms", the second "Pandora's Box" .. a resolution acceptable to all is unlikely so Jane et al .. it's your business model, great that you asked for feedback (reminds me of a certain survey we have going on down here in Oz at present).. but do what you think will "fit" the business model.. bearing in mind that probably less than 5% of members participate in this thread!

We are talking here only about indexed cookbooks. I have some 450 cookbooks, only 188 of them are indexed that makes some 42%. And I'm not counting the titles in foreign languages: italian, french ... So if I'm looking for a recipe with some ingredients I go first to EYB to see the list and decide what to do. Then I go the recipe in the cookbook, or luckily on the web, and see the quantities making a shopping list.

One should keep an eye on perishable food as they are perishable per se so discard them when needed.

Store-cupboard ingredients you should have all time at home and keep replenishing. By the way there is a good UK title called "Kitchen Shelf" which is around some 20-25 core ingredients mixed with some cupboard spices and herbs and a few other ingredients per recipe. Something for young couples. On the other hand Kenji Lopez-Alt stores more than 200 ingredients.

It seems the problem is more in the filtering process which should be more transparent with examples.

I would suggest to give discounts on membership when indexing so one learns the list through doing a useful job, otherwise I would not change a thing.

But let me come back to the beginning of my story. What to do my 58% of unindexed books. Long before I encountered EYB I made in MS Access a list of cookbooks of my own in order to avoid duplicating. Then I added a list of recipes with page numbers and some category fields. Recipe titles in english are quite easy to search with boolean ...

And only if we could post in our private recipe area scans from cookbook recipes. That would be the top is that a real copyright problem?

How to do a reduction is a theme for another post.

There is an argument to keep status quo for consistency. Though things should be reviewed from time to time as technology and information storage develops (or demand dictates). If the means existed to include store cupboard ingrdients but omit them from searches unless specifically 'ticked' that might be helpful for users?

I'm going to say no.

Here's my reasoning: none of the ingredient lists are complete enough to be a shopping list anyway.  Among other things, quantities aren't listed.  So I always need to go to the actual recipe in order to write my shopping list.

I also can't say that the failure to index store-cupboard ingredients has ever prevented me from searching for something I wanted to find on EYB.

The only good reason I could see to index them is for the folks on restrictive diets, but since EYB search doesn't support boolean logic anyway (chard but not [milk or cheese]), I'm not clear on how someone can exclude an ingredient from a search.  And they couldn't trust the results anyway thanks to the backlog of 1.5m recipes.

There is also a similar issue with optional items and substitutions. My most common reason for searching by ingredient is to get rid of the rest of an ingredient. For that purpose I'm just as happy with a substitution or an optional ingredient. Yes, they need to be flagged as optional/substitution but it would certainly be more useful if they were listed.

mjes - adding every alternative ingredient would be even more of a drain on our indexing resources. Some authors give multiple substitutions - every extra ingredient that is added as a substitution is one less ingredient that will be added in a new recipe.

I would say, keep things as they are, especially since it is clearly stated "Always check the publication for a full list of ingredients."

That being said, if a change is made, would it help to have designations such as "store-cupboard dairy", and "store-cupboard dry goods" that could be used when needed for help with allergens, rather than listing every possible ingredient?

Or perhaps just making the list of store-cupboard ingredients very accessible, maybe with a link from the above disclosure to the actual indexing list?

Even the seemingly simplest change is quite complicated, isn't it?