How to keep 100+ recipes under control

At thirty recipes, organising is unnecessary: you know them all and find everything by title. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred, that flips. You know you had a good recipe with fennel, but what was it called again, and was it filed under "pasta" or under "Italian"? From that moment on, your organisation decides whether your collection is a working tool or an attic.

The good news: the solution is not a clever system. It is a few simple agreements with yourself, kept consistently.

Categories are weaker than you think

The classic reflex is to make folders: starters, mains, desserts, or Italian, Asian, comfort food. It feels organised, but it breaks in two places.

The first problem is that every recipe fits several folders. Is a Thai noodle salad "Asian", "salad" or "quick weeknight"? Wherever you put it, a year later you will look in the other folder. The second problem is that folders force a choice at the moment of saving, when you have no idea how you will search for the recipe later.

Labels (tags) solve exactly this, because a recipe can carry several. That noodle salad is simply "thai" and "salad" and "quick", and you find it via all three routes. Nearly every modern recipe app therefore works with labels instead of folders; in Recettino you filter your cookbook with one tap on such labels.

Keep your label set small and boring

Labels have their own pitfall: sprawl. If you invent a label on the spot for every recipe, a year later you have "pasta", "pastas", "pasta dish" and "Italian-pasta" sitting side by side, and nothing filters any more.

The remedy is a small, boring, fixed set. Think in three kinds of labels:

• The type of dish: soup, salad, pasta, traybake, dessert.
• The occasion or pace: weeknight, weekend, festive, packable.
• The diet or main ingredient: vegetarian, fish, chicken, low-carb.

Two to four labels per recipe is plenty. More labels do not improve finding, they only slow down saving. And if you hesitate whether a new label overlaps an existing one? Then it overlaps an existing one.

The title is your main search entrance

Do not underestimate the recipe title. "Oven chicken" and "That chicken from Christmas" are both worthless once you keep fifteen chicken dishes. A good title names the main ingredient and the distinguishing feature: "lemon chicken with garlic and thyme". That reads like a menu and searches like a dictionary.

The same goes for the description or note attached to the recipe. One line about why this recipe is in your collection ("kids' favourite, make a double batch") pays for itself every single time.

Pruning is part of the deal

A collection that only ever grows becomes unusable by itself, however good your organisation. Plan fifteen minutes of maintenance once a season and ask of every recipe you have not touched in a year: would I still save this today? Recipes you never cook because a better version sits right next to them can go. Borderline cases get one more season.

This feels unnatural, because deleting looks like loss. But every recipe you keep "just in case" stands in the way of the recipes you actually cook. A hundred recipes you would happily eat are worth more than three hundred of which two-thirds is noise.

One habit that holds it all together

If you take one thing from this guide, let it be this: process new recipes immediately, in the same week you find them. Tidy up the title, add two or three labels from your fixed set, one line on why you are keeping it. Thirty seconds per recipe.

A collection never falls apart all at once. It happens gradually: ten quick saves without labels, ten more a month later, and after a year the backlog is too big to catch up. Those thirty seconds at the front door are the difference between a cookbook and a pile.