Forum

I just noticed while perusing one of the newly added magazines that flour and eggs were listed in the ingredients.  Did the cupboard-ingredient listing get abandoned?  If so, kudos to who ever pulled the trigger on that!

No, the rule still applies though if the quantities warrant it, those ingredients are added.  The magazine you saw may have been indexed by a new indexer who hadn't quite got the rules yet.

You will find more store-cupboard ingredients listed for blog recipes as those are indexed in a different way.  The data is scraped from the blog and our indexers then proofread it, adding categories.  So all ingredients for blog recipes are listed.

'Store-cupboard ingredients' really undermines the value of EYB. I just posted on it then and saw this post after!

When we started indexing cookbooks (some long time ago) we analysed the ingredients that were coming up the most and they were all ingredients that most home cooks would always have in stock - flour, butter, eggs, olive oil, sugar, onions, garlic, etc - the basics for all cooking and baking.  We took the view that since the most time consuming part of indexing is adding the ingredients, that if we cut out store-cupboard ingredients (except where they are a main part of the recipe) then we could index a lot more books.  We also felt it was extremely unlikely that anyone would be searching for recipes using any of these ingredients.

We do recommend that members check the recipe in their cookbooks before going shopping so they can check if they have all the store-cupboard ingredients required.  If you are finding recipes when you don't have access to your cookbooks, e.g. from work, then you can generally estimate what store-cupboard ingredients may be required from the type of dish it is.

Have I missed something in the way that you find store-cupboard ingredients annoying?

I do understand the desire to improve the speed of indexing books to make the site useful.  

That said, the decision not to index those ingredients means that data is lost forever to the site.  If it were in the database, you could always have a setting in the frontend that filtered out that info if it was distracting.  Also, if you had that data then you wouldn't need indexers to indicate whether a recipe was, say, vegan.  It could be generated on the fly based on the database info.  Likewise, 'glutenfree' could be done based on ingredients so that even recipes that didn't specify they were such or that the indexer didn't catch would come up in the search.

I can think of situations where some of these ingredients might searched for.  For instance, someone might be interested in a savory drink or smoothie that contains garlic.  No way to search for that unless the recipe calls for enough to trigger it to be listed.  Or maybe I want to find some ice cream recipes or protein drinks specifically with eggs.  And then there is possible functionality for searches excluding ingredients:  Flourless chocolate cakes, eggless ice creams, whether or not the book called them out for this status and the indexer put them in the egg-free category.

But I understand there are competing interests here: the site also needs lots of books to be indexed to be useful in the first place, so speed of indexing does matter.