The ingredient catalog

Every recipe is built from the same shared list. Ingredients shows it, with a category, a default unit, its allergens, and used in — how many recipes reference it.

Used in is the column to read first. It is what makes this a catalog rather than a pile: one ingredient, many recipes, so a correction lands everywhere at once.

Allergens are the reason this is shared

An ingredient carries its allergens, and recipes roll them up from what they contain. Mark Redfish fillet as Fish once and every recipe using it inherits Fish — including recipes that reach it indirectly, through a prep.

That is the whole argument for a shared catalog. If allergens lived on each recipe, one missed edit would be a recipe that under-declares, and nothing would tell you which one.

So the highest-value work in this screen is allergens, not tidiness. An ingredient with no allergens set is not neutral — it is a claim that the ingredient has none.

Units

Each ingredient has a default unit — oz, cup, cloves, each. It is the unit offered when the ingredient is added to a recipe, not a limit; a recipe can specify something else.

Whether the line reads imperial or metric is a brand and location setting, not an ingredient one — see Setting up your locations.

Adding one

Add ingredient creates one directly. You can also create ingredients without leaving the recipe editor — the ingredient picker offers Create ingredient and Create prep when what you typed does not exist yet, so an empty catalog never blocks you from writing your first recipe.

That convenience is also where duplicates come from.

Duplicates, and why they are worth cleaning

Because ingredients can be created inline and by import, the same thing arrives twice under slightly different names — Kosher salt and kosher salt, Yellow onion and yellow onions. Nothing breaks, which is exactly the problem:

• allergens have to be set twice, and one copy usually is not
• used in splits, so neither copy looks important
• a cook reading two recipes sees two names for one tin

Tavorly finds them for you. A duplicates filter clusters likely matches, ignoring order, case, plurals and punctuation, so you review a handful of clusters rather than reading 24 rows looking for near-twins.

Merging is a brand admin action. You pick the record to keep and one or more to merge in; every recipe pointing at the merged-in copies is repointed at the survivor.

⚠ Undo is available for two minutes, and then it is not. A recent merge shows an undo affordance inside that window; after it lapses the merge stands. That is long enough to catch “I kept the wrong one” and short enough that it is not a substitute for looking first.

⚠ Check the survivor’s name and allergens. Merging combines usage; it does not adjudicate which spelling was right, and the copy that survives should be the one whose allergens are correct.

Do this after an import, which is when duplicates arrive in bulk.

Related

• Importing recipes from a spreadsheet — imports create ingredients they do not find
• Prep — preps are building blocks, not ingredients