Your cookbook
How saved recipes are organised in A La Carte — searching, collections, tags, favorites, 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 filter by title, ingredient, or cuisine. The filter chip next to it lets you narrow by favorites only or by meal type. Recipes are sorted by most recently added by default; you can switch to alphabetical via the sort menu.
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.
Long-press a card, or tap the Select pill, to enter selection mode for bulk actions like deleting several recipes at once.
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, by long-pressing it in the Cookbook, or in bulk via Select mode. You can create a new collection from the same picker.
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 you can rearrange cards by long-pressing until they jiggle, then dragging. That order is remembered.
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 filter chip lets you select several tags at once to narrow the grid.
Favoriting a recipe
Tap the heart icon on any recipe card to favorite it. Turn on the heart filter chip in the Cookbook header to show only favorites.
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, and tags.
The 'Edit with AI' button lets you ask for a change in plain language ('make this vegetarian', 'double the servings', 'swap the shellfish'). 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'. The same works in the Create chat when making something new.
To delete, scroll to the bottom of the edit screen and tap 'Delete recipe'. This can't be undone.
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' 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'.
You can also upload your own photo, which is the nicest option once you've actually cooked something.
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.