Large
Recipe Collections
These sites contain recipes that cross multiple national categories and, for the most part, contain large numbers of recipes. They are good bets for finding multiple recipes of a particular type. For example, a search for banana bread in SOAR will produce well over 100 variations.
- Leite's Culinaria
- Leite's Culinaria is now one of my "must visit" sites. David Leite's site has expanded tremendously since I first reviewed it several years ago. Not only are there now more than 50 Portuguese recipes ranging from appetizers to desserts but there are also loads of recipes from James Beard House and multiple cookbooks. The photography is excellent and nearly every recipe I checked had a photo to go with it. The Portuguese recipes look delicious -- check out Carne Assada em Vinho d'Alhos (Portuguese Pot Roast in Wine and Garlic), one of the family recipes. Also take a look at the somewhat complicated shrimp turnovers (Rissóis de Camarão). Make sure you check the writings section of the site which contains many columns and features written by David. I find most of the columns both informative and humerous, particularly the ones from The Morning News. You can also find his site listed in the European section of my site (under Portugal/Spain). (Last reviewed: 15 Jan 2006)
- recipezaar.com
- Browse recipes by course, cuisine, main ingredient, preparation, special diets, and more. Search by name or ingredient, use the advanced search feature, or search based on what you have on hand. The recipes provide nutritional information in a format like you find on most products in the U.S. and you can also scale the recipe to the number of servings you'd like to make and convert measurements from US to metric although that part is a bit iffy depending on the structure of the recipe. Some recipes are rated by users. There's a wide selection, but it's easy to navigate around. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- SOAR (The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes) aka RecipeSource
- This site, formerly at University of California Berkeley, is huge -- nearly 70,000 recipes -- it's overwhelming. SOAR, now known as RecipeSource allows you to browse through recipes by category (side dishes, special diets, etc.), by region/ethnic group, or use the search engine. I've had hit-and-miss luck with the search. They have updated their computer, search engine, and URL -- so far I haven't seen the overloaded message I used to get. HOWEVER ... a slap on the wrist for not putting a forwarding page with their new URL at the old address. If you try the old address, it just times out. I would have thought those Berkeley folks would know better ... they're as bad as the French sites I keep losing. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- allrecipes.com
- A fairly well-organized site. Recipes are organized in categories and sub-categories within category. The navigation is straightforward and an excellent feature is the summary of each recipe that is displayed so you can get an idea of what it is without looking at the details. Some other features: you can enter the number of servings and the recipe will reload scaled to the number of servings and many of the recipes have been rated by users (although usually only a handful of users). (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- CyberSoup: by NetCooks.com
- This isn't a huge site, but it has over 25 categories to browse and an advanced search by category and/or country and/or keyword. Recipes are submitted by users and organized alphabetically which could be a problem, but there aren't thousands in the categories so it's relatively easy to browse. The site also provides a section on herbs and spices, cooking terms, ingredient substitutions, and a links page. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- Arielle's Recipe Archives (recipes.alastra.com)
- About 70 categories of recipes all selected from Usenet newsgroup rec.food.recipes. The site claims to have about 30,000 recipes archived. If you choose a category you get an alphabetized list which may be frustrating (such as in the Cajun category where you will find Red Beans Rice 01 through Red Beans Rice 29). But there is also a search engine which I found to be quick and reasonably efficient. It's not a fancy site, but it makes up for that with speed. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- Epicurious.com
- One of the well known sites; home to Bon Appétit and Gourmet magazines. They have thousands of recipes from the two magazines (many with photos). There are multiple ways to search for recipes (by keyword, using a cross-reference by cuisine, preparation, course, etc., and by category). Instructions are usually quite detailed and there are also reviews by people who have tried the recipes. Sometimes the recipes can be more complicated than you have time for, but overall the quality is very good. Too bad there's so much advertising. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- Dorothy McNett's Place (happycookers.com)
- This site is divided into 57 categories (about 1400 recipes) and also provides an alphabetized list of all the recipes. This is an eclectic site, you might find something very ethnic like Kai Phat Khing (Thai) or something as simple as homemade lemonade. There is a search capability which will list found products first, then articles, and finally recipes so your search results will vary depending on what your search term is. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- Kitchenlink.com
- There are thousands of recipes on this site along with links to hundreds of other sites. The recipes are submitted by users so the quality of instructions, whether or not number of servings is provided, etc. is variable. The recipes are classified by type (i.e., dessert, main dish, bread) and by sub-category in the big categories. You can search by title or when you've picked a category search for a word within a title. Recipes are displayed in the browser or in a "printer friendly" format. The problem with searching by title or word within a title is that some titles aren't very descriptive. It would be helpful to be able to search by main ingredient too. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)
- The Master's Tech Home - Recipes
- Nothing special about this site other than a decent search engine and there are quite a few recipes (about 1400) that range from appetizers to vegetarian. A decent variety and a lot of "home style" recipes. All the recipes I looked at appear to have been submitted by site users, although there may be some from other sources. The flashing ads that were active the day I visited were VERY irritating. (Last reviewed: 26 Dec 2004)