Gourmet Recipe Manager (2024)

Gourmet Recipe Manageris a recipe-organizer available for Windows, Linux, and other Unixsystems (including Mac OS X, i.e. via the Fink or MacPorts packagemanagers) that allows you to collect, search, organize, and browseyour recipes. Gourmet can also generate shopping lists and calculatenutritional information. It imports Mealmaster, MasterCook andKRecipe files and exports PDFs,webpages and other formats. Gourmet is free software anduses Python, GTK+ and SQLAlchemy.

For an overview of the features Gourmet Recipe Manager offers,feel free to browse through the tabs on top of the page. You candownloadGourmet Recipe Manager from the GitHub project page andfile bug reports andmake feature requests there. Our Launchpad project page will allow you toseek help and sign up for the mailing list.

Simple Search

A simple index view allows you to lookat all your recipes as a list and quickly search through them byingredient, title, category, cuisine, rating, or instructions.Searching happens as you type to save you keystrokes, and multiplekinds of searches can easily be combined from this same view (soyou can search for salads (category) with walnuts (ingredient)without having to open a separate dialog. You can easily sortrecipes by clicking on the column you'd like to sort by.Furthermore, for advanced users, you can search using regularexpressions.

Recipe Card Display

Individual recipes open in their own windows, just like recipecards drawn out of a recipe box. Recipes are attractively displayedwith a minimal amount of controls and settings cluttering theinterface. From the recipe card view, you can instantly multiply ordivide a recipe, and Gourmet will adjust all ingredient amounts andeven adjust the units to keep them as readable as possible (so that2 tbs. x 4 displays as 1/2 cup).

Since you often need to refer to ingredients as you read arecipe, the ingredient list is displayed in a separate pane, sothat you can look at ingredients as you scroll through the steps ofa recipe.

The recipe card view also includesnutritional information for your recipe. Clicking on the "Edit"button brings up a simple wizard that will bring you through theingredients in your recipe, allowing you to pick equivalences fromthe USDA nutritionaldatabase or enter nutritional information by hand. Gourmetdoes its best to choose good defaults as it guides you through yournutritional information, and it remembers your settings for futurerecipes. The nutritional information is not directly tied to thedisplayed ingredient information, so you can make reasonablesubstitutions and approximations for nutritional calculationswithout damaging the integrity of your recipes. You can also tellGourmet to ignore certain ingredients — no need towaste time looking up nutritional information for every last spiceafter all!

Future versions of Gourmet may make use of this information toallow searching and selecting recipes by nutritional content— for now, we just display the information we have and try tomake it easy for those interested in nutrition to enter in theirdata as quickly as possible. In the future, we will also providemore information by default, and we may look for a way to create acommunity-generated database of nutritional information andequivalences.

Recipe Editor

Gourmet aims to make entering ingredients as intuitiveand painless as possible, while still allowing for powerfulfeatures. Features include:

• A keyed ingredient list which allows searches and shopping-listgeneration to understand synonyms (like aubergine and eggplant) andignore ingredient descriptions (i.e. to treat "tomatoes, finelychopped" as "tomatoes" for the purpose of searching and generatingshopping lists.
• An intuitive spreadsheet-like editing interface
• An alternative, fast form-like ingredient entering interface(which allows you to easily type ingredient lists without lookingat the screen.
• Drag-n-drop support for importing ingredient lists from yourweb browser or other application.
• Support for pasting ingredient lists in from yourclipboard.
• Support for grouping ingredients within a recipe.
• Support for calling another recipe as an ingredient.(Note: thisallows you to use a recipe as a menu!)
• Support for optional ingredients.

In addition to ingredients and instructions, you can enterinformation about categories, cuisines, and ratings that you canlater use to search for recipes. In each case, Gourmetallows you a drop down menu of standard categories and categoriesyou've used in the past, but also allows you to enter any customcategories you like.

You can also add images to your recipe for an attractivedisplay. Thumbnails will be displayed in the recipe index.Currently, only HTML export supports images.

Import and Export

Gourmet includes simple and powerful import and exportfilters for a number of formats, including the two most commonrecipe formats on the web (mealmaster and mastercook).

Gourmet can import the following kinds of files:

• Mealmaster Files
• MasterCook text files
• MasterCook XMLfiles
• Gourmet XML files
• KRecipe XMLFiles
• MyCookbook files
• Archives (such as Zip Files, Gzip Files, or Tarballs)
• Websites, such as epicurious and recipezaar
• Unformatted plain text files or websites (in this case, Gourmetwill ask you to identify ingredients, instructions, etc.

Gourmet also can import ingredient lists from a regularplain text list, which can be imported from a file, pasted from theclipboard or dragged onto the editing view.

Gourmet can export the following kinds of files:

• PDF Files
• Recipe Web Pages
• Rich Text Format
• Plain Text
• Mealmaster Files
• Gourmet XML Files
• MyCookbook files

Gourmet aims to import and export as many commonformats as possible. If you have a format you'd like to import,please submit a feature request, or, if you're a programmer, goahead and start writing the filter yourself!

Shopping List Manager

Gourmet allows you toautomatically generate shopping list from your recipes. You caneasily multiply recipes when you add them to adjust for the numberof people you're cooking for. If the units are convertable,different units used in different recipes will be added upcorrectly on your shoppings list (Gourmet even knows thedensity of some common foods to allow volume-to-weightconversions!). If Gourmet can't convert your units, theshopping list will simply display both units -- for example, thescreenshot shows both tsp. and cloves of garlic, since these unitscan't be sensibly combined.

If you already have an item that appears on your shopping list,you can drag it into your "pantry" so it won't be included! Itemsadded to your pantry will be remembered in the future (so you don'thave to manually remove items like "water" from your shopping listevery time a recipe calls for it). However, since the pantry listis shown next to the shopping list, you will always have a list athand of all the ingredients called for by your recipes. (You candrag an item back from the pantry to the shopping list if you'verun out.)

The shopping list is also automatically sorted into categories.Gourmet knows the basic categories of a number of foods(produce, meat, fish), and you can create whatever categories areconvenient for your own shopping -- I use it for sorting out thebasic sections and aisles of my local grocery store and those itemsthat I get from specialty stores. You can set up shoppingcategories as you enter recipes, or you can move ingredients aroundwithin the shopping list view by drag and dropping or using a popupmenu.

Credits

Gourmet Recipe Manager by Thomas MillsHinkle and contributors.
Website Design by BernhardReiter and Kati Pregartner.
Cookie icon by Nyall Dawson.
Download button by Adam Willoughby-Knox.

Gourmet Recipe Manager is licensed under theGPL.

Contribute

If you want to contribute to the project and you're a pythonprogrammer, please take a look at the sourcecode (hosted at GitHub) and start hacking! Due to its plugin-based architecture, Gourmet can be easily extended bynew features. If you would like to use Gourmet in alanguage other than English, you can help translate gourmet usingthis web-basedtool (this requires no programming knowledge!).