Review: Eat Your Books - and a discount code

We're delighted that our Top 10 Cookbooks article was chosen to feature in the Eat Your Books 'Best of the Best 2025' list. For those of you who are new to Eat Your Books, it is a fabulously useful way of bridging the gap between digital convenience and the joy of cooking from physical cookbooks - and you can try it for free for a month with the Chatting Food code CF2026.

Eat Your Books is not a recipe website - they don't publish the recipes as that would be breaking the copyright of these great cookbook authors and publishers. The purpose of EYB is to help you find recipes in your own cookbooks and magazines, the blogs you follow and the many online recipes. Our Deputy Editor has over 350 cookbooks and swears by this, having used it for years to find specific recipes or a touch of inspiration. Here's how it works:

• Register. You can have a free membership with up to 5 books or magazines and unlimited online recipes, or choose a monthly or annual Premium membership: see Member Benefits to choose the membership that suits you.

• Select the cookbooks you own from the library of 175,000 cookbooks and add to your EYB Bookshelf; once added, their recipe index will be automatically available. Once you have added them all, you can search by clicking on My Bookshelf.

• Start searching for recipes - you can search on recipe name, ingredients, occasion, food type, ethnicity, book title or author.

• Click on a recipe for a list of the key ingredients (other than common staples like flour, oil, salt etc) so you can see what you need to buy; you can add recipes to a shopping list and Eat Your Books will print out the ingredients you'll need.

• You can tag books and recipes with bookmarks which is a great way to organise your favorite recipes, ones you are planning to cook that week, great midweek options or any other categories you can think of.

• Chat on the forum with other members who share a love of cooking and cookbooks; see their comments and ratings on books and recipes.

• There are 560,000+ recipes in the EYB Library that have online links. They bring together the best recipes on the internet into one searchable index. You can add any of them to your personal collection.

They have also launched Cookshelf, the mobile app version of Eat Your Books. Like Eat Your Books, CookShelf is designed to help cookbook lovers actually cook from their books more often. When you can't remember which book has that great recipe for lemon drizzle or you've got cabbage wilting in the fridge, CookShelf lets you search across all the recipes in your entire cookbook collection by ingredient, dish type, or craving – and then sends you to the right page.

If you have more than a handful of cookbooks and you wish you used them more effectively, here is your answer.