Carême

Why Carême exists

We love cookbooks. Real, physical, beautiful cookbooks. The kind you prop open on the counter with a bag of flour, the ones with butter-stained pages and handwritten notes in the margins. Cookbooks are so much easier to use in the kitchen than a phone or tablet — you can flip between pages, see the whole recipe at a glance, and you don't worry about your screen locking while your hands are covered in dough.

But findingthe recipe you want? That's always the trick. You know you saw a great beef bourguignon somewhere — but was it Julia Child or Jacques Pépin? Was it in the French country cooking book or the one about winter suppers? And when you're standing in your kitchen wondering what to make with the chicken thighs and lemons in the fridge, there's no way to search across thirty cookbooks at once.

Carême fixes that. Scan your bookshelf, and we build a searchable recipe index across your entire collection. Search “lamb tagine” and instantly see which book has it — and on what page. Grab the book, open it, cook.

No typing recipes into your phone. No replacing your books with an app. Just a smart index for the library you already love.

For whom we are named

Marie-Antoine Carême

Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833) is known as “the king of chefs and the chef of kings.” He was abandoned on the streets of Paris at age 10. By 25, he was cooking for Napoleon. By 30, he was the most famous chef in the world.

He was the first person to systematize French cuisine — writing the bestselling cookbooks that codified everything from the four mother sauces to the chef's toque. He organized cooking into a system. We organize cookbooks into a system. He wrote the books. We index them.

How it works