Cookbooks at your fingertips

There’s a shelf in one of my kitchen cabinets that’s rarely touched. It’s not empty. Some of the interesting things it holds are old; some of them are inherited. It’s where we keep our recipe books.

We almost never open them because there are apps available for our smartphones and tablets that list many thousands of recipes. And the apps have extra powers that make them much more convenient than a book.

The Big Oven app, free on iOS and Android, is a great demonstration of why recipe apps can be better than recipe books. It lists more than 250,000 recipes, with a powerful search engine that offers many options for finding a recipe you’d like.

There’s a “leftovers” search trick, excellent for using up spare food in your refrigerator. The app looks just like a traditional glossy book – right down to its photos and clearly marked sections telling you how many people each recipe serves, its calorie content and its reviews.

But it is actually a huge searchable database of recipes that people have uploaded (you can use your device to upload one of your own). Among its many thousands of recipes you may sometimes find one that you don’t like or one that confuses you with its preparation instructions. You can give that recipe a low score.

And even though a quarter of a million recipes sounds like a good thing, sometimes it’s tricky to find a high-quality recipe for the dish you want. You can use the basic features of the app for free.

An alternative app called Epicurious, which is free on iOS and Android, also offers a shared grocery list, but its graphics are better. While Big Oven uses a search-centric interface, Epicurious suggests recipes by categories like “fast and fresh” or “I can barely cook.” This means it feels speedier and slicker to use.

You can still search for recipes by ingredient, and you can even search by photos alone. The Epicurious app is easy to use while you’re cooking. It uses large, well-spaced fonts and has clear demarcations between the ingredients section and the cooking instructions on each recipe’s page, and there are big tabs to tap (probably with sticky fingers) to check out reviews. Epicurious contains tens of thousands of recipes from the original Epicurious website, coming from what the makers say are professional sources.

For a totally different recipe experience – good if you’re a novice cook or pressed for time – you may love 20-Minute Meals ($7 or Rs 377 on iPhone and Android). Jamie Oliver, the British TV chef, offers 60 recipes that he says won’t take long to make. It’s easier to use than some complex recipe apps and includes several cooking tip videos.

It also has a grocery shopping section that helps you shop by sorting food into categories matching supermarket aisles. If you do use these great apps, remember that the one problem with electronically delivered recipes versus cooking books is spills.

Drying the pages of your recipe book is cheaper than buying a new tablet. (To avoid that issue, you can slip your device inside a sealable plastic food storage bag.)