In many homes recipes are scattered everywhere: a grandmother's notebook, browser bookmarks, photos of book pages, messages forwarded by relatives. When you want to bake that cake from two years ago again, finding it is a quest. A digital recipe book hosted at home puts everything in one place, available from every phone and tablet. Mealie is a free project designed for exactly this, with features that also help organise the week in the kitchen.
What it offers
Mealie is a web application with a modern interface that also suits small screens. Its main features are:
- Recipe book with ingredients, steps, times, servings, photos and notes.
- Import from URL: paste the address of a recipe and Mealie extracts its data.
- Weekly meal planner.
- Shopping lists generated from recipes or filled in by hand.
- Organisation with categories, tags and kitchen tools.
- Groups and households, to share the recipe book with the people you live with.
It installs from a container image and, for home use, works well with the built-in SQLite database.
Importing from websites
The most convenient feature is automatic import. Many cooking sites include structured data in their pages following the schema.org «Recipe» schema, designed for search engines. Mealie reads this data and creates a clean recipe, without adverts or long introductions.
The result should still be checked: sometimes quantities end up in the text, units of measurement are written in different ways or photos are missing. A one-minute review at import time avoids confusion when you are cooking with flour on your hands. For sites that do not expose structured data, you can enter the recipe by hand or paste the text and tidy it up.
Digitising paper recipes
Family recipes are often the most precious, and the only ones you cannot find online. A practical method:
- Photograph each page in good light, even just with your phone.
- Create the recipe in Mealie, transcribing ingredients and steps.
- Attach the original photo: grandmother's handwriting has a value no transcription can replace.
- Add a tag such as «family» or the name of whoever handed it down, so you can find them all together.
It is work you can do at leisure, a few recipes at a time, perhaps involving the relatives who know them best.
Structured ingredients
Mealie can parse ingredients by separating quantity, unit, food and notes. The advantage is concrete: you can scale servings, doubling or halving quantities, and shopping lists correctly merge the same foods coming from different recipes.
| Written ingredient | Quantity | Unit | Food | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 g plain flour | 200 | g | plain flour | |
| 2 eggs at room temperature | 2 | eggs | at room temperature | |
| a pinch of salt | 1 | pinch | salt |
Automatic parsing is not perfect, especially with text in languages other than English, but correcting it once makes the recipe reusable forever.
Meal planning and shopping
The weekly planner lets you assign recipes to days and meals. From there you generate the shopping list with the ingredients you need, adding by hand whatever is missing from the cupboard. The list can be checked on your phone at the supermarket and ticked off as you go. Everyone in the household sees the changes, so nobody buys the same thing twice.
Access for the whole family
A recipe book works only if everyone uses it, so access must be simple:
- Create an account for each family member, with suitable permissions: who can edit and who can only browse.
- On tablets and phones, add Mealie to the home screen: it behaves almost like an app.
- Consider access from outside the house through a VPN, useful when you are at the supermarket.
- If you use a single sign-on system, enable login through OIDC, which Mealie supports.
Backups and exports
Mealie includes a backup feature that creates an archive with the database and images, restorable from the interface. Even so, include the data folder in the server's general backup. To avoid being tied to a single program, you can export recipes: an extra safeguard for an archive that, over time, can become a small family heritage.
In short
- Mealie gathers recipes from websites, books and family notebooks in one place.
- Import from URL relies on structured data, but should always be reviewed.
- Paper recipes are digitised by attaching the original photo.
- Structured ingredients let you scale servings and build shopping lists.
- An account for each family member and regular backups make the recipe book last.
