Recipes

Captures, standardizes, scales, and files recipes into a personal collection that stays searchable and cookable. Use when the user pastes a recipe URL, photo, screenshot, video, voice note, or handwritten card to save; asks to halve, double, or triple a dish, or fit it to a different pan or tin; converts cups to grams, ounces to millilitres, Fahrenheit to Celsius, or gas marks, or adjusts for a fan oven or altitude; asks what to cook from what is saved, or searches by ingredient, tag, time, or rating; builds a week from the collection with one combined shopping list; swaps a missing, disliked, or off-limits ingredient; rewrites a dish for a pressure cooker, air fryer, or slow cooker; works out cost per serving; writes or tests an original recipe; preserves a family recipe; or moves a collection between apps. Not for stove-side rescue (cooking), general cooking help (chef), household meal systems (meal-planner), calories and macros (calories), or pantry lists (grocery).

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/recipe/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/recipe/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files, never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. Read ~/Clawic/data/recipe/index.md before answering "what can I make", before searching the collection, and before saving a recipe that may already be in it. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it.

Write before the session ends whenever it produced something durable: a recipe captured, corrected, rescaled into a keeper variant, or retired; a dish actually cooked and how it went; a week planned; an ingredient price; a fact about their kitchen that changed a number (oven offset, pan sizes, altitude, salt brand); a source that proved reliable or unreliable; or something they will re-read — a dinner menu with its run-sheet, an oven-calibration note, a cookbook draft. memory-template.md holds every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

Allergies, intolerances, and diet-relevant conditions go to the shared health box ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md, not here, and are read before proposing or adapting anything — the same file answers for every food, fitness, and travel skill, so a shellfish allergy learned here is never asked twice. People you cook for go to the shared contacts box ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md, one row per person, their dietary note in Context. A cookbook, a supper club, or a catering job the user runs as a project gets its one-line status in the shared projects box ~/Clawic/data/projects/<project>.md, one file per project, while the draft itself stays here. All three protocols travel in memory-template.md; the user may have none of the owning skills installed.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved. A pasted recipe-app export or sync config carries API keys: strip the value and store the pointer — env:PAPRIKA_TOKEN, keychain:nyt-cooking, 1password:Personal/Recipes. If data sits at an old location (~/recipes/ or ~/clawic/recipe/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/recipe/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where.

A recipe is a set of ratios plus an order of operations; everything else is decoration. Capture the numbers exactly as written, convert them to weight, record where they came from, and never lose the original. Work from defaults immediately: never open with questions about their units, their diet, or how proactive to be. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: units, locale, currency) → the Configuration table default.

When To Use

• Saving a recipe from anywhere — link, photo, screenshot, video, dictation, cookbook page, handwritten card — into a file that can actually be cooked from
• Doing the arithmetic on a recipe: scaling, pan swaps, cup-to-gram conversion, oven temperature and fan/altitude correction, cost per serving
• Working the collection: searching by ingredient or time, deduplicating, tagging, rating, pruning what was never made
• Rewriting a recipe for different equipment, a missing ingredient, or a dietary restriction, without guessing at the ratios
• Producing something from the collection: a week's plan, a combined shopping list, a dinner-party menu with a run-sheet, a printed card, a family cookbook
• Not for cooking the dish (cooking — heat, seasoning, doneness, rescue), general cooking help and technique explanations with no file at the end of them (chef), the household meal system beyond a week built from this collection — standing menus, batch-cooking programmes, food budgets (meal-planner), macro tracking (calories), or store-level pantry and list management (grocery)

Quick Reference

Situation	Play	Depth
"Save this recipe" — link, photo, video, dictation	Extract to the canonical file, keep the original numbers verbatim, record the source	capture.md
Recipe is a wall of blog prose	Take yield, ingredients, steps, times, temperatures; drop the story; keep one line of the headnote if it states a technique	capture.md
"Is this recipe any good?" / it looks off before cooking	Run the ratio sanity checks — hydration, salt %, leavener, fat, time-vs-temperature	vetting.md
Writing or fixing the recipe file itself	Frontmatter schema, ingredient-line grammar, step grammar, yield statement	format.md
Cups to grams, °F to °C, gas marks, fan oven, altitude	Density per ingredient, never a universal factor; fan −20 °C; boiling point drops ~1 °C per 300 m	conversion.md
Halve, double, triple, or fit a different tin	factor = target ÷ base, then fix the non-linear terms (→ What Does Not Scale)	scaling.md
Missing, disliked, or off-limits ingredient	Substitution ratios by function (bind, leaven, brown, thicken, acidify), marked untested	substitutions.md
Vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sodium version of a saved recipe	Convert by function, then re-check the leavening and the liquid	substitutions.md
Pressure cooker, air fryer, slow cooker, sous vide, bread machine, oven-to-hob	Time and liquid mapping per device, and what does not transfer at all	equipment.md
"I made it, here's what I changed"	Make-log row, rating, and the change promoted into the recipe's Variations	testing.md
"What can I make?" / find by ingredient, tag, or time	Query the index, not the folder; tag vocabulary and dedup rules	library.md
Plan a week and give me one shopping list	Pick for overlap, aggregate lines to one unit per ingredient, round to package sizes	planning.md
"What does this cost per serving?"	Unit price × quantity ÷ edible yield, summed, divided by servings	costing.md
Writing an original recipe for other people	Test rounds, yield accuracy, ingredient ordering, headnote, what a tester needs	authoring.md
Grandma's card, a relative dictating from memory, a fading photocopy	Preserve the original artifact first, then build the tested version beside it	preservation.md
Import from or export to an app; back up the collection	Field mapping, JSON-LD, dedup on merge, print cards	migration.md
Anything else recipe-shaped	Answer from the collection first — cite the saved file — then from general knowledge, and say which	—

Coverage map: capture.md getting it in · vetting.md will it work · format.md the file · conversion.md units and temperatures · scaling.md batch and pan math · substitutions.md swaps by function · equipment.md device rewrites · testing.md cooking it and recording it · library.md search, tags, dedup, pruning · planning.md weeks and shopping lists · costing.md cost per serving · authoring.md writing for others · preservation.md heirloom recipes · migration.md import, export, backup.

Core Rules

1. One recipe, one file, from the first one. ~/Clawic/data/recipe/recipes/<kebab-title>.md, plus its row in index.md, written in the same turn. A recipe that exists only in the conversation is lost at the end of it, and a recipe with no index row is unfindable — the folder is storage, the index is the collection.
2. Capture verbatim, normalize second. Write the source's own numbers into ## Original before converting anything. Every conversion loses information (a cup of flour is a range, not a number), and the day a scaled version fails, the only way back is the original text. This is not optional for handwritten and family recipes (preservation.md).
3. Weight is the unit of record for anything baked or scaled. Convert with the ingredient's own density, never a universal factor: 1 US cup is 236.6 ml but 120 g of flour (King Arthur, spoon-and-level), 200 g of granulated sugar, 227 g of butter, 340 g of honey. Dip-and-sweep flour measures ~142 g/cup — an 18% error on the ingredient the whole formula is built on. Volume stays for liquids under ~50 ml and for anything the user measures by eye. Governed by weight_over_volume.
4. Scale by ratio, then fix the terms that are not linear. factor = target_servings ÷ base_servings. Multiply every mass by it, then walk What Does Not Scale below before writing the result. A scaled recipe that changed only the numbers is wrong in the pan size, the timing, or the seasoning — usually all three.
5. Time and temperature belong to thickness, not to mass. For the same shape, thickness ∝ mass^(1/3) and cooking time ≈ ∝ thickness², so doubling a roast adds ~60% time, not 100%; doubling a tray of cookies means two trays, not one deeper one. Every scaled recipe finishes on an internal temperature or a stated visual cue, never on the old clock time.
6. Every quantity carries a unit and every recipe carries a countable yield. "4 servings" is unverifiable; "12 muffins" or "4 servings × ~350 g" is. Yield is what scaling, costing, and the shopping list all divide by — a recipe with a vague yield poisons all three.
7. Attribution travels with the recipe. URL with capture date, or book plus edition and page, or person plus year. Sites rewrite and delete recipes; without the source you cannot reconcile your variant against the original, credit it, or judge it when it fails.
8. A substitution or a scale is untested until the make log says otherwise. Mark it untested in the recipe file. testing.md promotes it to the ingredient list only after it was cooked and rated — otherwise the collection quietly fills with recipes nobody has ever successfully made.
9. Nothing enters or leaves the collection silently. Saving, merging a duplicate, promoting a variant, and retiring a recipe each write their row: index.md for the entry, made/<year>.md for the cook, memory.md ## Boxes for any new file. Retirement means the row moves to ## Retired in index.md with a one-line reason — a collection that only grows stops being a collection.

Measures That Change The Dish

Same word, different quantity. Each of these has silently doubled or halved an ingredient in a recipe that read fine.

Measure	The trap	Use
Cup	US 236.6 ml · metric (AU/NZ) 250 ml · Japan 200 ml · UK legacy 284 ml	Grams; if the source is a cup, record which cup in ## Original
Tablespoon	15 ml almost everywhere, 20 ml in Australia — 4 teaspoons, not 3	Millilitres or grams; an AU tablespoon of salt is a third more salt
Kosher salt	Diamond Crystal ~2.8 g/tsp · Morton ~4.8 g/tsp · fine table salt ~6 g/tsp	Grams always. A recipe written in Diamond Crystal, measured in table salt by volume, is ~2× the salt
Egg	US large 50 g out of shell (white 30 g, yolk 20 g); EU L is 63-73 g in shell — a US large is closer to an EU medium	Grams for anything baked; whisk and weigh to get a half egg
Stick of butter	US only: 113 g (4 oz, 8 tbsp)	Grams
Flour, 1 cup	120 g spoon-and-level, ~142 g dip-and-sweep, more again if packed	Grams; if the source is US volume, assume 120 g and say so
Oven °C/°F	Fan/convection runs hotter than the dial: reduce the setting by 20 °C (35 °F) or the time by ~25%, not both	State conventional or fan in every temperature, driven by oven_type
Gas mark	GM4 = 180 °C, GM1 = 140 °C, GM9 = 240 °C — the steps are uneven (10 or 20 °C), so read the mark off the table in conversion.md and never interpolate	Convert to the user's temperature_scale and keep the mark in ## Original
"1 can" / "1 packet"	Can and packet sizes differ by country and by decade	Record the gram weight on the tin, not the count
"Medium onion"	~150-200 g raw; recipes disagree by a factor of two	Grams, with the count in parentheses

What Does Not Scale Linearly

Multiply the masses by factor, then correct each of these before writing the scaled recipe.

Term	Behavior	Rule
Pan or tin	Area, not volume, tracks the batch	Round: area = π(d÷2)². 20 cm → 314 cm², 23 cm → 415 cm² = ×1.32. Keep the depth, scale the area by factor; a doubled batter in the same tin bakes raw in the middle
Oven and roasting time	Tracks thickness²	Double the mass of the same shape ≈ ×1.6 time (Rule 5); finish on internal temperature
Salt and seasoning in a pot dish	Linear, but error is one-directional	Scale it, then at factor ≥ 2 add 80% of the scaled amount and correct at the end. You can add salt; you cannot remove it
Chili, garlic, strong spice, alcohol	Perceived intensity grows faster than the dose	At factor ≥ 2, start at 75% of the scaled amount; also gated by spice_level
Chemical leavener	Linear against flour weight, and band-limited	Hold 1-1¼ tsp baking powder (4-5 g) per 120 g flour. If the scaled amount leaves that band, the original was already out of it — the one exception is a recipe built on self-raising flour, which carries ~6 g per 120 g by specification (substitutions.md)
Yeast	Scales with the dough, not with the clock	Keep the baker's percentage: 0.5-1% instant yeast on flour for same-day, 0.1-0.3% for an overnight cold ferment. Changing the schedule changes the yeast; changing the batch does not
Salt in bread dough	Fixed percentage	1.8-2.2% of flour weight, always
Reduction and evaporation	Rate ∝ exposed surface area	Doubling a sauce in the same pan doubles the reduction time; use a wider pan to keep the time, or accept the longer cook
Frying oil, blanching water	Governed by thermal mass, not by recipe factor	Batch so the oil recovers to temperature within ~1 minute of the food going in; more food per batch, not more time
Eggs and other countable units	Land on fractions	Weigh: 25 g of whisked egg is half a US large egg. Never round a half egg up in a batter

Output Gates

Before delivering a recipe, a scaled version, a conversion, or a plan:

• Is the yield stated as a countable unit, and does every quantity carry a unit (Rule 6)?
• Was this scaled? Then: pan area recomputed, time restated as an internal temperature or cue, and the non-linear terms corrected — not just the numbers multiplied.
• Did I convert volume with the ingredient's own density, and is the source's original measure preserved in ## Original?
• Does anything here conflict with ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md (allergies, conditions) or the diet variable? An allergen is never substituted silently — name it, then offer the swap.
• Is the source recorded with a date, and is any substitution or untried scale marked untested?
• Did anything durable come out of this — a recipe, a cook, a plan, a price, a kitchen fact, a menu? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes or index.md line, in this same turn.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/recipe/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
units	metric | us-customary | uk-imperial	metric	The system every captured recipe is converted into; ## Original always keeps the source's own system (conversion.md)
weight_over_volume	bool	true	Whether ingredient lines lead with grams and keep volume in parentheses, or the reverse (Rule 3)
temperature_scale	celsius | fahrenheit	celsius	Every oven temperature and doneness target; gas marks are always converted into it
oven_type	conventional | fan | gas | none	conventional	Applies the fan offset (−20 °C) or the gas-mark table to every baked recipe (equipment.md)
altitude_m	number (metres, 0-4000)	0	Above 1000 m, triggers the leavener, liquid, sugar and boiling-point corrections in conversion.md
default_servings	number (1-20)	2	The yield captured recipes are offered scaled to, and the divisor in costing.md
diet	list (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, halal, kosher, low-sodium, …)	none	Filters suggestions and pre-applies the conversions in substitutions.md. Chosen patterns only — allergies live in the shared health box, never here
spice_level	mild | medium | hot	medium	Scales chili and pepper quantities when adapting or scaling a recipe
currency	text (ISO code)	from profile.yaml, else USD	The currency every price and cost-per-serving carries in its value (costing.md)
index_grouping	course | cuisine | none	course	How index.md is ordered, and the axis the collection splits on when it outgrows one file
pantry_staples	list	salt, pepper, cooking oil, water	Ingredients excluded from generated shopping lists (planning.md)

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Tooling — whether recipes are also emitted as JSON-LD or a print card, which app the collection syncs with, plain files versus an export target (migration.md)
• Conventions — file naming, tag vocabulary, headnote length, step numbering, whether the blog prose is dropped entirely or kept as one line
• Platform and locale — ingredient naming (cilantro/coriander, eggplant/aubergine), what is actually available where they shop, hemisphere for seasonal suggestions
• Safety posture — how loudly to flag raw-egg, undercooked-pork, canning and cross-contact risks, and whether an allergen may be substituted without asking first
• Output register — full recipe versus steps only, whether to show the arithmetic of a scale, how much of a headnote to write
• Work order — vet before saving or save then clean, capture-then-normalize batching, whether a scaled version is saved as a variant or a separate recipe
• Chosen sources — the sites, cookbooks and creators whose recipes are trusted by default, and the shop whose prices anchor costing.md
• Restrictions and exclusions — banned ingredients, equipment they do not own, techniques they refuse (deep frying, sous vide, raw fish)
• Cadence — how often to review never-made recipes, refresh prices, export a backup, refresh the seasonal shortlist — each accepted cadence becomes a row in the ## Due table of memory.md

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Saving the link instead of the recipe	Sites paywall, rewrite, and delete; the bookmark survives, the recipe does not	Extract to a file, keep the URL as attribution with its capture date (capture.md)
Converting cups with one universal factor	A cup is a volume; every ingredient has a different density	Per-ingredient density table (conversion.md)
Doubling a cake and using the same tin	Depth doubles, so the outside sets before the centre cooks	Scale the pan area, keep the depth (What Does Not Scale)
Multiplying the oven time along with the recipe	Time follows thickness, not mass (Rule 5)	Restate the finish as an internal temperature or a visual cue
Trusting "1 tsp salt" across salt brands	Diamond Crystal to table salt by volume is roughly a doubling	Record salt in grams and name the brand in ## Original
Rewriting grandma's card into modern units and discarding the card	The odd measure ("a coffee cup of flour") is the only calibration that exists	Photograph the original, keep it verbatim, build the tested version beside it (preservation.md)
A collection of 400 recipes and 9 ever cooked	Hoarding feels like cooking; the index gets useless faster than it gets big	Made count in the index; review never-made recipes on a cadence, retire with a reason (library.md)
Substituting an allergen without saying so	The user needs to know their dish changed, and a silent swap in a saved file becomes an invisible risk later	Name the allergen, name the swap, mark it untested, check the shared health box first
One shopping list per recipe	The overlap between recipes is where the saving and the waste both live	Aggregate to one unit per ingredient, then round to package sizes (planning.md)
Pressure-cooker time taken from the oven version	Pressure changes the mechanism, not just the speed, and the liquid minimum is a hard floor	Device mapping table (equipment.md)
Recording a make as "good"	Next month it answers nothing	Rating plus the one change you made plus the one thing to fix (testing.md)
Editing the recipe file mid-cook from memory	The change that mattered is forgotten by the time the plates are cleared	Make-log row first (made/<year>.md), promote to the recipe when it repeats

Where Experts Disagree

• Volume versus weight. Baking is settled — grams, because a cup of flour varies ~18% by hand. For everyday savoury cooking the argument for cups is real: fewer dishes, faster, and the error does not matter in a stew. The frontier is whether the dish has a ratio that can break (batters, doughs, custards, brines, cures) — those get grams whatever weight_over_volume says.
• Keeping the blog prose. Purists strip everything but ingredients and steps; the counter-argument is that the headnote sometimes carries the only statement of technique or intent ("do not stir after this point"). Default: drop the story, keep any sentence that changes what you do.
• Baker's percentage for everything. Bread bakers write all formulas as percentages of flour; it makes scaling trivial and cross-recipe comparison possible. Outside doughs and batters it adds a translation step every time you cook, which is why most collections stay in mass. Use percentages where flour is the backbone, mass elsewhere.
• How faithful a captured recipe should be. One school files the recipe exactly as published and records changes only in notes; the other files the version they actually cook. Both work; mixing them does not. The Original/Ingredients split in format.md is what lets you hold both without ambiguity.
• Star ratings versus make counts. Ratings drift and are re-litigated after every cook; a make count is objective and predicts what will be cooked again far better. Keep both, sort by makes.

Security & Privacy

Local storage: the collection, preferences, plans, make log, prices and generated artifacts stay in ~/Clawic/data/recipe/ on this machine, plus dietary facts in the shared ~/Clawic/data/health/, people in ~/Clawic/data/contacts/, and the one-line status of a cookbook or catering job in ~/Clawic/data/projects/. Recipe text, sources and quantities only.

Health data: allergies and conditions are read to keep a suggestion safe and are written only when the user states them. This skill gives no medical advice; a reaction, a diagnosis, or a restriction that keeps changing belongs with a clinician.

Capture: fetching a recipe URL reads a public page. It does NOT log in, bypass a paywall, store credentials, or transmit the collection anywhere.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/recipe (install if the user confirms):

• cooking — heat, seasoning, doneness and rescue once the recipe is in front of the stove
• meal-planner — longer-horizon menus, batch cooking and household logistics
• grocery — pantry inventory and store-level list management
• calories — calories, macros and targets for what gets cooked
• nutrition — micronutrient gaps and dietary-pattern coverage

Feedback

• If useful, star it: https://clawic.com/skills/recipe
• Latest version: https://clawic.com/skills/recipe

Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/recipe.