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I would like to reopen this discussion. Here is my list of reasons that these should be indexed:

• Milk, eggs, peanuts. nuts and wheat are among the most common allergens. 1 in 13 children have food allergies so that cooks are often wanting to eliminate recipes from consideration that have the ingredients.


• When looking at bread recipes, knowing whether it is a basic dough or an enriched dough is a major decision point for the baker; this distinction is hidden as eggs, milk, and sugar are rarely in quantities that make them show.


• When items such as dumplings as made as a garnish, the pantry items are used in such small quantities that you end up with an ingredient list of "store-cupboard" ingredients which leaves one with nothing but the title to guess what the garnish actually is. 


• Related is the problem that the same recipe indexes differently depending upon the number of servings made i.e. cookbooks for 1-2 people show fewer ingredients that cookbooks for 6-8 people. This makes it looks like recipes are different when they are not, forcing me to look through extra cookbooks to pick a recipe.


• Those of us who are cooking for only 1 or 2 people, especially if our cooking is Pacific Rim or Latin American focused, we frequently are out of pantry items, especially fresh item as they could go bad before they are finished. This means not only do we need the recipe to tell us we need to buy it; we need to easily find recipes that will use up small amounts.

I do understand why some people are concerned about changing the rules. However, I believe that the reasons for changing the rules are compelling for a world-wide market and that changing now will be less trumatic than changing later.

Why do I feel strongly about this? I cook for one; my niece and daughter-in-law have life threatening allergies; my pantry has 6 soy sauces often neither milk nor eggs so think Pacific Rim orientation. . . .

I understand your point, but I personally don't need the inclusion of these items. I also cook for one, but always have these ingredients on hand. If adding them limits the amount of recipes EYB can include, I would vote to continue their omission.

I would fall on the side of leaving them out, especially due to the issue of "flooding" search results.  Items like onions, milk , eggs could easily flood your results.  That is exactly what happens when you google for recipes by common ingredients without any qualifiers.

Usually if I look at a recipe, I have an idea of what staples might be needed.  I would rather have more recipes indexed than included the pantry items.  This may be because  I have about 50 books that are unindexed, including a few I use frequently.  

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a store less about a half mile walk that sells many basics and two full grocery stores within 2 miles, so I have easy access.  I suppose that people who live some distance from grocery stores may have more of an issue. 

The issue is not what one personally needs, it is what is best for the users as a whole and for the company to grow. And, as has been mentioned elsewhere, some people see a good ingredient in the store and search for recipes there, away from their cookbook collection.

I believe that Jane's proposal was only for fresh pantry ingredients and strictly moving forward not going back to update recipes already indexed. If you look at the earliest books that are indexed, you will find there have already been a number of changes where earlier recipes were not brough up to the new standards.

I agree that for someone like yourself who plans out meals for a week with your cookbooks at hand, the change would not provide a noticeable benefits. However, there are many who have a very different approach. Unless I have special events that require advanced planning, I go to the market (meat, fish, ethnic, grocery ...) and see what is available and of high quality. In my boondocks, I cannot assume that anything fresh will be available - much is stocked in small quantities and it depends upon who shopped before me. Don't ask about my failure to find chestnuts to go into my traditional brussel sprouts the first year I moved out here. The result is that I may be purchasing a cut of meat or an uncommon vegetable (like the week they had name because of an error in ordering) that I don't have a recipe for in my head. I either guess or look up potential recipes on my phone. Another user expressing frustration at this problem is what motivated my raising the issue again.

I wish I had access to the statistics on the perishable pantry items as search terms for recipes. I doubt that they are frequently searched for. If I am right, the effect on the search engine and results should be minimal. However, the results would be more consistent as they would be less dependent on the number of servings the recipes is for.

Sidenote: when I lived in the city, I tended to shop daily. I was raised picking items out of the garden or the freezer or the pantry of home-canned foods. I've never made the switch from choosing the best, freshest ingredients to cook to choosing the recipes and hoping for the best for ingredients. Home ec teachers, dieticians, and financial planners never made a dent on my practice.

I am fine with the current approach - it works for me (I use the site to identify recipes, not to create the complete shopping list. For that I want to see the quantities needed anyway). I would rather have more recipes than more detailed versions. 

I wonder if there is a way of getting the best of both worlds, though. Could the storecupboard ingredients have a different category, where one could tick when submitting the recipe what of those is also included? Recipe searching would only be for the non store-cupboard items, preventing the swamping element. But those seeking to filter due to allergies etc could use them as an extra filter, and those doing the shopping could take it into account. 

I've thought along the same lines, Tiganna. I also agree that the current method works for many people - if it didn't, EYB would not have growing clientele. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't grow faster if it met the needs of a broader base.

Could you index them with those ingredients and then provide a filter so that when searching, a person could say y/n to including those ingredients in the search?

Maurbrown - that solution wouldn't really help as we would still have the extra cost of adding those extra ingredients (and so would be indexing fewer books). And if the member could say yes or no to those ingredients they could be excluding them even if they are a major ingredient.

We've just made a change to how we index eggs that we hope will simplify EYB's notorious "egg math". As of today, 'eggs' are no longer a store-cupboard ingredient and will always be listed, regardless of the number called for. There are new, simpler guidelines about how to deal with partial eggs (whites, yolks) in combination with whole eggs as well; see the Notes on Eggs section of the Indexing Form Instructions for more information.

Excellent especially for those of us for whom eggs are not a pantry item.

That will make life a lot easier for indexing!  I think Sydney despaired of me ever understanding the previous egg math guidelines!!

I just have a question about one of the store-cupboard items: mustard. Why is the excluded ingredient Dijon mustard and not just mustard? Is that really the most common mustard used in the United States? But why specify?

For red wine and white wine, we exclude them if that's all the recipe called for but include them if the recipe specifically calls for Marsala wine or a dry red wine. That makes sense.

So why specify Dijon mustard? I guess this means if I'm indexing a book that calls for yellow mustard, then I should obviously include it, but what if the recipe simply calls for "mustard" or "prepared mustard"? Am I including it or excluding it?

Wasn’t going to reply to this as the original post is months old but I have to agree with the sentiments of OP. Then again it’s hard not to see the issue as moot as with so many recipes ‘missing’ (pantry) ingredients a change in direction now is just going to sow additional confusion.