Support

No. There's no sign-up and no login. Everything you add lives on your iPhone.

The recipes aren't packed into the app. On first launch it downloads them from the Wikibooks Cookbook and builds the Atlas and the Road from them. On a normal connection this takes about 30 seconds; you'll see the thread being laid kitchen by kitchen.

You can go through the welcome screens while it works. If you start offline, the app says it needs the internet once and offers to try again.

Yes, for everything already downloaded: the Road, the Shelf, the Atlas, saved recipes and cook mode. Recipes whose text hasn't been downloaded yet are marked "needs connection" and aren't suggested on the Road until you're back online.

A tail is a leftover rare ingredient sitting on your Shelf: the half bottle of fish sauce, the open tin of coconut milk. Everyday things like salt, onions or rice never become tails.

The Road suggests next dinners that use your tails. A badge like "−2 tails · +1 new" means the dish uses up two of your tails and needs one ingredient you don't have yet. Tails have no expiry date and the app doesn't remind you about them.

Drift is how far a swap moves the dish from the original, shown as one to three bowls: 1, almost the same; 2, noticeably different; 3, a different dish.

If you accept a level 3 swap, or several swaps that add up to 5 or more, the recipe is marked "Your own version". That's a label, not a warning.

Swaps come from a hand-written table built into the app, covering the hard-to-find ingredients that show up most often. If an ingredient isn't in that table, there's no chip, because we'd rather show nothing than make up a stand-in.

Swaps also only appear in the ingredient list, not in the step text, and the app never suggests swapping one meat for another or anything containing alcohol. If you think a common ingredient deserves a swap, email us.

It means no other recipe in the catalogue uses that tail yet. The app says so instead of guessing, and lets you keep the jar on the Shelf or remove it. Below it, the Road offers a fresh start from your last stop.

Open the Shelf, tap the jar, and close it. Closing a tail by hand doesn't add a stop to your Road. After you cook a recipe, marking an ingredient "used up" closes it automatically.

To empty the Shelf and start completely over, use Settings → Reset (see below).

Tap the heart on any recipe. Saved recipes appear under Saved in the Atlas and stay on your device, available offline once downloaded. Cooking a saved recipe adds it to your Road like any other stop.

No. The filters hide recipes whose ingredient list includes pork, beef, or any meat or fish. They only read the ingredient lists written on Wikibooks, which can be incomplete, so always check labels yourself.

The app's buttons, labels and swaps are in English and French (Canada). The recipe texts come straight from the English Wikibooks Cookbook and aren't translated, so they stay in English.

The app asks once, on the last welcome screen. To change your answer later, go to iOS Settings → Notifications → Bouillon Road. Everything else in the app works the same either way.

Recipes are written by volunteers on the Wikibooks Cookbook and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Every recipe screen has a "View source & contributors" link, and Settings → Credits lists the source, the license and the photo credits.

If a recipe itself is wrong (a missing step, an odd quantity), the best fix is on Wikibooks: open the source link, then edit the page or leave a note on its discussion page. The app picks up changed pages when it next checks for updates, about once a week. If the problem is how the app shows a recipe, or a photo credit is wrong, email us with the recipe name.