# Decent Cookbooks

> Great cookbooks rebuilt as weighed recipes: every ingredient in grams, each dish's spice mixes (masalas) weighed spice by spice so they can be made on the Half Decent Scale, and the method in Decent's own words. Each recipe also has Decent's own description, how many it feeds and the portion weight, nutrition (calories, and fat, carbohydrate and protein calories), a heat rating from its chillies, a fragrance rating from its spices, its diet with the swaps that make it pescatarian, vegetarian or vegan, substitutes for every ingredient, and comparisons with similar dishes. A free, read-only JSON API and an MCP server serve the same data.

Decent Cookbooks is published by Decent Espresso Ltd at https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/. It has one section so far, Indian cooking (https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/), with the recipes of six books; each recipe names its own:

- India: Cookbook (Pushpesh Pant, Phaidon, 2010)
- Curry (Maunika Gowardhan, Quadrille, 2025)
- Thali: Create and Eat Indian Thalis at Home (Maunika Gowardhan, Hardie Grant, 2021)
- Tandoori Home Cooking (Maunika Gowardhan, Hardie Grant, 2023)
- Indian Kitchen: Secrets of Indian Home Cooking (Maunika Gowardhan, Hodder & Stoughton, 2015)
- Kricket: An Indian-inspired Cookbook (Will Bowlby, Hardie Grant, 2018)

## Using this data, and how to credit it

- Decent's own content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), to the extent Decent Espresso Ltd holds rights in it: the recipe descriptions, the method wording, the spice-mix names and notes, the nutrition, heat and fragrance figures, portions, substitutes and diet swaps, similar-dish comparisons, and the AI-generated dish and ingredient pictures.
- The recipe facts (recipe names, ingredients and amounts, servings, times and regions) come from the books named above. Facts like these can't be copyrighted (US Copyright Office, Circular 33: a "mere listing of ingredients" is not protected), so Decent claims no rights in them and offers no licence for them. None of the books' own writing is reproduced; the method wording is Decent's. No text, photographs or illustrations from the books are used: every picture was made by Decent. Recipes are served one at a time (website, API and MCP), never as a whole book. Decent has no licence or permission from the books' publishers: none is needed for facts, and nothing else is used. Please buy the books.
- When you use or quote this data, credit "Decent Cookbooks" with a link to the recipe's page, and name the source book. Every API response includes a `cite_as` line and a `license` block.
- Nutrition figures are estimates from standard food-composition values for the ingredients as weighed.

## MCP server (Claude and other AI assistants)

- `https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/mcp` is a Model Context Protocol server for Decent Cookbooks. Add it as a connector in Claude (or another MCP app), or `claude mcp add --transport http decent-cookbooks https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/mcp/account`. Opened in a browser, it lists its tools and states the content rights.
- No account needed: `list_cookbooks`, `search_recipes`, `list_recipes`, `get_recipe`, `get_ingredient`.
- Connecting needs no sign-in; the first time a member tool is used, the app asks to sign in on decentespresso.com's own page (`https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/mcp/account` signs in when connecting instead). With a free decentespresso.com account it also keeps My Kitchen (the spices and staples in your cupboard) and tells you which dishes you can cook, plus the Liked and Made lists, shared with the website.

## JSON API

- Guide: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/api/ (Markdown for agents, a web page in a browser, JSON at /cookbooks/api/index.json)
- `GET /cookbooks/api/indian/recipes` (filters: kind, diet, main, heat), `/recipes/{slug}`, `/ingredients`, `/ingredients/{slug}` (English or Indian name, e.g. haldi), `/search?q=`
- Read-only, no key, 60 requests a minute per IP. OpenAPI: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/api/openapi.json

## Pages

- Every recipe: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/dishes/
- Spice mixtures and pastes: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/spice-mixtures/
- Ingredients, with weights per spoon and piece, substitutes and nutrition: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/ingredients/
- My Kitchen (free account): https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/kitchen
- Dishes by main ingredient: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/main/ (one page per main, e.g. /main/Mutton, and per pair, e.g. /main/Mutton/Peas; add ?c=dish, bread, rice, pulse, soup, snack, chutney, sweet or drink for one course)
- RSS of every dish, most popular first: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/feed.rss
- Licence and credits: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/license · Privacy: https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/privacy · Questions (including from authors and publishers): https://decentespresso.com/support/submit
- Glossary (ingredients, utensils and basics in our words, how to make hung yoghurt, coconut milk and a dough seal, and each chilli's Scoville heat): https://decentespresso.com/cookbooks/indian/glossary/