Sending a recipe

paprika@traveller.org is a mailbox that turns recipes into entries in your Paprika Recipe Manager 3 account. You email it a recipe — a photo of a magazine page, a screenshot, a link to a recipe website, or the recipe text pasted into the email — and a short while later the recipe is in Paprika on your phone, with its text laid out properly and a photo attached where there is one.

Recipes can be in English or French. They are kept in whichever language they arrived in; a translation into the other language is added at the very bottom of the recipe’s Notes, clearly marked as being for reference only.

Only two people can use the mailbox, and each person’s recipes go only into their own Paprika account. It knows who you are from the email address you send from — so always send from your usual address, the one that was set up for this. Mail from any other address bounces straight back.

The three ways to send a recipe

The mailbox looks at your email and works out which kind of submission it is, in this order: if there are photos attached, it is a photo submission; if the body is essentially just a link, it is a link submission; otherwise it treats the body as pasted recipe text. You don’t have to label anything.

A photo or screenshot

Best for magazine pages, cookbook pages, recipe cards, and screenshots.

What you do

1. Take a clear photo of the recipe (or a screenshot). Make sure the whole recipe is visible and the text is sharp.
2. Attach the photo(s) to a new email — from your usual address.
3. Send it to paprika@traveller.org. The subject and body can be empty.

If the recipe spans more than one photo — a two-page spread, or the ingredients photographed separately from the instructions — attach all the photos to the same email. They are combined into one recipe. (Sending several different recipes at once is covered on the next page.)

A recipe card that lists only ingredients, with no instructions printed, is fine to send: it comes through with the ingredients and an empty directions section. Steps are never made up to fill the gap.

Note: when photos are attached, anything you type in the subject or body is read only as a note about the photos (for example “2 recipes”) — it is not treated as recipe text, and a link in the body of a photo email is ignored.

A link to a recipe website

What you do

1. Copy the address of the recipe page.
2. Paste it into the body of a new email — the link on its own, with little or no other text around it.
3. Send it to paprika@traveller.org.

The recipe is read from the web page, along with its photo when the page has one. If you paste a long block of text that happens to contain a link, the text is what gets used — so for a link submission, keep the body short.

Pasted text

What you do

1. Paste the full recipe — ingredients and steps — into the body of a new email.
2. Send it to paprika@traveller.org.

Quantities and units are kept exactly as written, and nothing that is missing from your text is invented.

What comes back

Every submission gets exactly one reply email — nothing you send disappears without an answer. The reply is one of these:

• “Recipe imported” — the recipe was sent straight to your Paprika account. Open Paprika and pull down to refresh (cloud sync) and it appears.
• “Recipe ready to import” — the automatic route didn’t go through this time, so the recipe is attached to the reply as a Paprika file instead.

What you do when the recipe arrives as an attachment

1. Open the reply email on your iPhone.
2. Tap the attached file (its name ends in .paprikarecipes).
3. Choose Open in Paprika. That one tap imports it.

Either way, the reply also contains a link to a web page showing the recipe — more about that page, and about sending several recipes at once, on the next page. If something went wrong instead, you get an email saying so; see “When something goes wrong”.