Paprika is good software. It’s a recipe database for home cooking, just like the Honeywell Kitchen Computer. But it doesn’t cost $10,000 and you don’t have to go to Nieman Marcus to buy it; it’ll run right on your own portable telephone.

The problem Paprika solves very well is “I want this recipe on my iPhone so I can read it in the kitchen”. It also has good tools for “make me a shopping list for these three meals”, I’ve used that on the fly while standing in the grocery store.

The weird thing about Paprika is it’s not a web app. There is no web view of your recipe database. Instead there are iOS and Android apps ($5) and Mac and Windows desktop apps ($20-$30). They’re all linked to some cloud server that stores your recipes. No subscription fee.

So the part that’s clumsy is adding new recipes to your database. There’s a way to search and browse from inside the iPhone app that works OK. But mostly I find recipes on my desktop web browser. For that need there’s a bookmarklet which does a fine job of saving the recipe (and nothing else). Behind the scenes the Paprika system scrapes the ingredients and instructions out of the web page and puts them in some normalized format. That’s not easy to do but it’s worked every time for me so far.

I’m very happy with the iPhone app and use it regularly when cooking. Ken and I share a database, which seems nice. I haven’t tried the desktop apps nor have I done anything complicated with our database, it’s mostly just Pocket-for-recipes for me. I’m still a bit baffled the business is built the exact opposite of how I would have (web app, charge a subscription fee) but what they’re doing works fine, so why not?