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Your cookbook
How saved recipes are organised in A La Carte — searching, collections, tags, scaling servings, cover photos, and sharing.
Browsing and searching recipes
The Cookbook tab shows every recipe you've saved as a grid of cards. Tap a card to open the full recipe with ingredients, instructions, nutrition, and the original source.
Use the search bar at the top to find a recipe by anything in it — the title, its tags, an ingredient, the cuisine, your notes, the steps, or where you saved it from. Every word you type has to match somewhere, so typing two words narrows the results rather than widening them. Matches on the title come first, and when a recipe matched on something else a small line under its card tells you where. Search always looks at your whole cookbook, whichever view or collection you are in.
The tag icon next to the search bar narrows the grid by tag — pick several and only recipes carrying all of them stay. The sort menu offers Suggested (the default: imports you haven't opened yet first, then the recipes you cook most often), Recent, Oldest, Most cooked, and A-Z.
The toggle at the right of that same row switches the tab between two views: the icon with four large squares shows your collections, and the one with sixteen small squares shows every recipe you've saved in one flat grid. The tab remembers whichever view you left it on.
Tap the Select pill to pick several recipes at once for bulk actions — Delete, or Remove when you are inside a collection and only want them out of that collection. Long-pressing a card does something different: it enters Rearrange, where the cards jiggle and each wears an ⓧ on its corner — that ⓧ deletes the recipe. Tap Done, or tap any empty space around the cards, to leave Rearrange; an empty-space tap leaves Select the same way.
On Android the Back button treats the Cookbook as home: from Pantry, Groceries or Meal Plan it takes you back to the Cookbook, and from the Cookbook it leaves the app. iPhone has no Back button, and the tabs don't swipe across.
Organizing with collections
Collections are user-named groups like 'Dinner', 'Pasta', or 'Thanksgiving'. A recipe can sit in several collections at once.
Add a recipe to one from its open card, in bulk via Select mode (Add to), or by pressing and holding a recipe that isn't in a collection yet and dragging it onto one.
To start a new collection, tap the + button in the row under the search bar, choose Collection, name it, and tap Create. The new, empty collection opens so you can add recipes to it. The same + button's Recipe choice opens the import and create options the Capy button offers. The New collection button at the bottom of the Cookbook also makes a collection, and so does the picker you see when adding a recipe to a collection.
In the collections view the Cookbook shows any recipes not yet filed into a collection, then the collections themselves. Flip the view toggle to its right-hand icon to see every recipe at once instead. Search always looks across ALL recipes regardless of which view or collection you are in.
Inside a collection, and in the view that shows every recipe, you can rearrange cards by long-pressing until they jiggle, then dragging. That order is remembered, and newly imported recipes still appear first in the every-recipe view.
Tagging recipes
Tags are your own short labels — 'quick', 'freezer friendly', 'kid approved' — and they work alongside collections rather than replacing them. A collection is a folder; a tag is a label you can mix and match.
Open a recipe, tap the pencil to edit, and use the TAGS section to pick existing tags or create new ones.
In the Cookbook, the tag icon lets you select several tags at once to narrow the grid.
There is no separate favorites button — a 'favorite' tag, or a collection, does that job.
Editing or deleting a recipe
Open the recipe card and tap the pencil icon to edit. You can change the title, ingredients, instructions, servings, time, tags, and the recipe's own dietary flags — vegetarian, gluten-free, halal and so on. Those describe the recipe; your own allergies and preferences live in Profile → My Kitchen → Dietary Profile.
With A La Carte Plus, the 'Edit with AI' button lets you ask for a change in plain language ('make this vegetarian', 'double the servings', 'swap the shellfish'). A limit like 'make this under 600 calories a serving' is checked the same way before you approve the change, and the calories you approve are the ones the recipe keeps. You can also reference your other saved recipes and the assistant will look them up — for example 'use my vanilla ice cream as a model for the base' or 'match the crust from my margherita pizza'. Referencing your other recipes works in the Create chat too, which is on the free plan. While it works you'll see the step it's on — planning the changes, then applying them. Changed your mind or spotted a typo? Tap the square Stop button where Send was: your message comes back into the box to fix and resend, and nothing is changed. Stop works the same way in the Create chat and in Ask Capy.
On the free plan, asking for an AI edit closes the chat and opens the upgrade screen rather than showing an error — your recipe is left exactly as it was.
There is no delete button on the recipe or the edit screen. To delete one recipe, long-press its card in the Cookbook until the cards jiggle, tap the ⓧ on its corner and tap Delete. To delete several, tap the Select pill, pick them, and tap Delete. The ⓧ deletes the recipe itself even when you are inside a collection; to take a recipe out of just that collection, use Select → Remove instead.
A deleted recipe is not gone straight away: it moves to Profile → Recently Deleted, where you can restore it for 30 days. See 'Recovering a deleted recipe' under Profile & Account.
Going back to an earlier version
Every time you save a change to one of your recipes (with Edit manually, an approved Edit with AI, a diet fix like 'Swap out parmesan', or a new serving count), A La Carte keeps the version it replaced.
To see them, open the recipe and tap the clock at the top right of its photo. History lists your versions, newest first: what changed, how (edited with AI, edited manually or restored) and when. The original recipe is always kept at the bottom, along with your 20 most recent versions.
To go back, tap Restore on a version and confirm. The recipe switches back, and the version you had stays in History, so you can switch again at any time. Restoring brings back the recipe itself (title, description, servings, times, category, diet labels, nutrition, ingredients, steps and notes) and the cover photo that version had. Each version in History shows its photo; if it shows an icon instead, there's no photo on record for it and your current photo stays. Tags and collections stay as they are.
History is free for everyone. A recipe you haven't edited yet shows 'No changes yet'.
Changing the servings
Change the serving count on a recipe and A La Carte rescales it — including the amounts written into the instruction text, not just the ingredient list. Halve a recipe and step four will no longer tell you to add both eggs.
Scaled servings carry through to the rest of the app: the grocery list and the meal plan both shop and plan for the number you set.
Amounts that shouldn't scale — 'season to taste', a pan size, an oven temperature — are left alone.
Recipe cover photos
Recipes imported from a link or a video usually arrive with the original image. If a recipe has no photo, or you don't like the one it came with, open the recipe and use the photo menu.
'Generate a Photo' (A La Carte Plus) creates a cover image from the recipe itself. You can describe what you want in the 'Describe your cover photo' box — a plating style, a background, a mood — and it is woven into the image. On a recipe that already has a photo the same menu reads 'Edit this Photo'. While the cover is being made, the card shows 'Generating photo…' — or 'Saving photo…' for a photo you uploaded, which is much quicker.
You can also upload your own photo, which is the nicest option once you've actually cooked something.
A La Carte keeps every photo a recipe has had. Once you've changed one, the photo menu shows 'Previous Photos': it lists the current photo first, then the earlier ones, newest first. Tap one to make it the cover again. It's free for everyone.
There is one exception to 'Generate a Photo' being a Plus feature: a recipe you generated in the Create chat, which spent one of the free plan's weekly imports and arrived without a photo, gets its cover made anyway. That waiver is for the first cover on that recipe only — once it has a photo, changing it again needs Plus.
Sharing a recipe with someone
Open a recipe and tap the share icon in the top-right. This creates a public link anyone can open — even people who don't have A La Carte. The link shows the recipe title, image, ingredients and steps, plus a 'Save to A La Carte' button if the recipient has the app.
To get all of your recipes out at once instead, use Profile → Export Recipes.