How a Kitchen Collection Comes Apart
Nobody sets out to scatter their recipes. It happens one small decision at a time. A page is bookmarked because there is no time to read it properly. A photograph is taken of a magazine on a friend's kitchen table. A tab stays open for three weeks because closing it feels like losing something. Each choice is sensible on its own, and together they produce a collection that exists everywhere and can be consulted nowhere.
The awkward questions arrive later, usually with a bag of vegetables already on the counter. Which version of the traybake did we like, the one with the lemon or the one without? Did I write down that the oven needed twenty minutes longer than the page said? Where was the soup recipe, the good one, the one I have made four times and still cannot remember the ratio for?
A bookmark answers none of that, because a bookmark is an address rather than a thing. It points at a page and trusts that the page will still be there, unchanged, in the same shape, when you arrive. Often it is. Sometimes the layout has moved, the site has been reorganised, the post has been rewritten with different quantities, or the address simply no longer resolves. The recipe you cooked from is not necessarily the recipe you will find waiting.
There is also the matter of what surrounds it. A recipe on the web sits inside a page built for reading rather than for cooking, and reading a page is a different activity from following it with your hands occupied. What you want at the stove is short: the list, the method, and whatever you learned the last time you made it.
What a Cook Wants to Keep Hold Of
Ask people who cook regularly what they actually want from their saved recipes and the answers are modest. They want the ingredients and the steps to be theirs, held somewhere steady, so that finding them again does not depend on anyone else's site staying the same. They want to put a recipe where they will look for it, in categories and tags that match the way they think about food rather than the way a publisher files it.
After that, the wishes get practical. Somewhere to write that the dough needed another handful of flour. A way to serve six on Sunday when the recipe was written for four. A view of the week so the shopping is done once rather than nightly. A list that comes out of the recipes already chosen, grouped so it reads sensibly in a shop. None of this is dramatic. It is simply the difference between a pile of links and a collection you cook from.
A saved recipe is something you hold. A bookmark is only a promise that someone else will keep holding it for you.
A Closer Look at Copy Me That
It is a recipe organiser rather than a publisher. It does not write recipes or own the pages you find them on. What it does, on supported sites and depending on how a page is built, is take the ingredients, the method and a photo and keep them in a collection that belongs to you.
From there the collection behaves like a cookbook you have assembled yourself: sorted into categories, tagged in your own words, searchable, annotated after cooking, and available through the web app and the mobile app on supported devices. Here is how the main pieces tend to work in practice.