I was looking in a recipe book for the recipe for moussaka. I knew I’d made moussaka before, and I was convinced that this was the correct book. I looked in the index and couldn’t find it listed, I flicked through the book and didn’t find it. Then I remembered, the recipe was called “red bean moussaka”. I looked in the index under red and there it was.
This isn’t the only recipe book to have this problem, in my experience recipe book indexes are often hopeless, in fact at least one recipe book doesn’t have one (preferring instead to list every recipe in the table of contents).
So, what should the index contain? I’m happy for the index not to divide food into sections – i.e. starters, main, vegetable etc as long as they do that in chapters or something. For me, the index should contain a list of food stuffs, and every recipe in which it is a major ingredient, so:
lamb
– moussaka
– rogan josh
– roast
etc
thus allowing me to find recipes based on what I have to hand.
