mcp-recipes

# mcp-recipes

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One question, several kitchens. An MCP server that asks every recipe source it
reads at the same time, merges what they say, and scales quantities in French
and English.

Today it reads two: **Marmiton**, in French, and the **Wikibooks Cookbook**, in
English.

No API key. No account. Read-only.

---

## What it does

Marmiton is a French recipe site with reader ratings and millions of visitors.
The Wikibooks Cookbook is an English wiki written by whoever edits it, published
under a Creative Commons licence. They write the same dishes differently, and
that difference is worth having in one place.

This server:

- **searches every source at once** and returns one list, each row naming the
  source it came from;
- **reads one recipe** in full and rescales it to any number of people;
- **scales an ingredient list** you already hold, offline, in either language or
  a list holding both;
- **puts one dish side by side**, as each source writes it, all rescaled to the
  same number of servings so the lists stand comparison.

### What makes the answers usable

Multiplying every number by a factor is arithmetically correct and practically
useless: it produces "2.4 eggs" and "0.67 pinch of salt" with the same
confidence as "267 g flour". Every quantity here lands where a cook can act on
it:

| The line says                             | Times six                           | Why                                                                      |
| ----------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `une pincée de sel`                       | `6 pincées de sel`                  | A pinch keeps the size a hand gives it; the count carries the proportion |
| `1 dose (cup) de Mountain Dew`            | `6 doses (cup) de Mountain Dew`     | A French line naming an English measure stays French                     |
| `2/3 d'un flacon de fleur d'oranger`      | `4 flacons de fleur d'oranger`      | A share of one thing becomes a count of them                             |
| `1/4 litre de lait`                       | `1,5 l de lait`                     | French writes its decimals with a comma                                  |
| `250 ml milk`                             | `1.5 l milk`                        | English writes them with a dot, and both climb the metric ladder         |
| `2/3 of a bottle of orange blossom water` | `4 bottles of orange blossom water` | The bottles are what is counted, and the water comes with them           |
| `a capful of rum`                         | `6 capfuls rum`                     | A measure named after what holds it is read as one, listed or not        |

### What divides, and what does not

A measure divides as far as half of what it holds is still a quantity a kitchen
can take out. Almost everything is: what a tin, a sachet or a carton
holds is poured, weighed or spooned, so half a tin of tomatoes is half a tin of
tomatoes and the rest keeps in the fridge. A leaf of gelatine and a sprig of
thyme are cut with a knife. A handful is halved by taking less.

An egg is the exception, along with a yolk and an egg white on their own: half
of one means beating it and weighing the result, which no recipe asks for. A
clou de girofle, a zeste and a zest go with it, having no half anyone takes.

A few measures go the other way and divide further. A pot, a bouteille, a
bottle, a jar and a block hold enough for a quarter to be a portion someone
serves. Une tranche and a slice are already cut off something larger, and the
board that produced one takes a corner off it in the same gesture. And a word can state a number of things rather than a measure of them,
so `2 dozen mushrooms` at three quarters comes back as **18 mushrooms**. A blanc
belongs to whichever food the line named: the white of an egg is counted whole,
a blanc de poulet is meat and halves.

A thing counted on its own is divided by the size of one against what a recipe
puts in, in either language. A crevette and a shrimp, une moule and a mussel,
une noisette and a hazelnut, un grain de poivre and a peppercorn, un anis étoilé
and a star anise is already a portion: a recipe counts twelve of them and a
smaller recipe puts one fewer in the pan, so they land on a whole number. Un
gigot and a leg of lamb, une baguette, un camembert, un ananas and a pineapple,
une pastèque and a watermelon, une pintade and a guinea fowl, un poulet and a
chicken, un poireau and a leek
sit at the other end of that comparison, asked for by the one or the two and shared out with a knife, so they go as far as the
quarter. A cut carved off one of them stops at the half, une cuisse and a thigh
being the portion the knife already produced. Un jus, and a juice, stops at the
half too: half the jus of a citron is
taken by squeezing half the fruit, and a quarter of one has to be poured out and
measured back.

The word `clove` names two foods, and the line says which. Garlic in the line
makes it the wedge broken off a bulb, the gousse d'ail, which a knife splits in
two; on its own, or written `whole cloves`, it is the dried flower bud, the
clou de girofle, and a count of those lands on a whole number.

- `3 eggs` taken from six people to twenty-five gives **13 eggs**, and never a
  half of one.
- `1 can tomatoes` at four tenths gives **half a tin**, with a note saying the
  line no longer holds its share of the recipe.
- `2 tablespoons butter OR 30 g margarine` doubled scales **both** branches, and
  the line is never reported as exact arithmetic: how far one stands for the
  other is the page's own claim.
- `4 tablespoons` at a tenth comes down to **1.2 teaspoons**. A measurement moves
  to a smaller unit _before_ it is rounded, so a small share survives.
- `1 lb 4 oz beef` doubled gives **2.5 lb beef**, and `1 kg 500 de farine` gives
  **3 kg de farine**. Two measures off one ladder written side by side are one
  quantity, and the smaller one can be left unwritten.
- `12 oz can tomatoes` comes back as published, with a note saying the measure
  gives what one tin holds and that the line states no count of them.
- `2 h de repos` comes back as published. A rest, a proof or a bake takes as long
  for a large batch as for a small one, so a length of time is not a proportion.
- `quelques feuilles de basilic` comes back as published, as do `a few basil
leaves` and the same line with `plusieurs`. A word saying there are several
  states no count, and any figure put behind it would be this server's reading
  rather than the page's quantity.

Every line comes back with a `scaling` field: `scaled` when the arithmetic
landed on the exact product, `rounded` when something had to move for the line
to stay usable, `unscaled` when the line carries nothing to multiply. A rounded
line says what it was rounded from and in which direction.

---

## Install

Node 24 or later.

```bash
npx -y mcp-recipes
```

### Claude Desktop

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "recipes": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-recipes"]
    }
  }
}
```

### With Docker

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "recipes": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/smeet666/mcp-recipes:2.0.0"]
    }
  }
}
```

`-i` keeps stdin open, which is where the protocol travels, and no `-t` is
passed: a TTY rewrites the stream and breaks it. The container needs outbound
HTTPS to `www.marmiton.org`, `en.wikibooks.org` and `api.wikimedia.org`, and nothing else: no volume, no port, no environment variable, no credential.

### From a clone

```bash
npm install
npm run build
node dist/index.js
```

---

## The four tools

### `search_recipes`

Asks every source at the same time, so asking them all costs about what asking
one costs.

| Argument           | Type                          | Meaning                                                        |
| ------------------ | ----------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `query`            | string                        | A dish or an ingredient, in any language a source publishes in |
| `limit_per_source` | integer, 1 to 25, default 5   | Rows to take from each source                                  |
| `sources`          | array of source ids, optional | Left out, every source is asked                                |
| `fan_out`          | boolean, default true         | Whether shorter wordings derived from the question go out too  |

The query goes to each source's own search as free text. There is no filtering:
a word naming a diet, a time or a calorie count matches only where that source's
index happens to carry it, and a question long enough