The internet is useful for finding things. Countless ideas are just a search away. But the erratic nature of being online, with the frenetic pace and deceptively simple style, can leave things unfindable again. Because chances are that recipe didn’t show up on a search. It appeared in your lap from the sacred algorithm, the great mystery. And heaven help you if it was a Reel or a TikTok.

I once turned to cookbooks, and still do. Their physical presence makes them easier to cook with and keep track of, for sure. But you have to have room on your bookshelf, and they can be heavy.

Online recipe apps seem like a valuable alternative, especially when it ensures you can take your recipes with you. But these require a formatting, preparation, and intentionality to them that I struggle to find rewarding. The app store is full of apps I’ve tried and deleted.

My spouse uses Pinterest, which is an easy tagging and sorting site. It is probably the easiest warehouse for recipes there is. But the recipes also don’t live there, and I find myself wrestling with websites full of big pictures with big loading times, which seem to reload every time the phone falls asleep.

Several of my favorite recipes sit on the wooden cookbook holder on the counter. Recipes I wanted to try, copied and pasted into documents, formatted to fit on one page, and printed. They don’t contain pictures or videos of that face the person always makes when they try their own food. I have a reliable recipe for peasant bread, a rich chocolate cake, and hootenanny amidst others we’ve accumulated over the years.

My pursuit of the ideal format is more compulsion than pragmatism. But there is an obvious truth made available by that stack of recipes, individual pages of printer paper, hand written recipes, and Hello Fresh recipe cards. These are the recipes we have in hand, ready to be used. When the purpose is to make something and we have the ingredients, these recipes have a leg up on the rest.