// the take
Cook is a Chinese-language recipe app built around a simple constraint: recipes limited to ingredients people actually have at home (it started during COVID lockdowns). It ships as a Nuxt web app, a native SwiftUI iOS app with CloudKit sync, and an Android build via Capacitor, all driven by recipe data pulled from a shared spreadsheet. It's for Chinese home cooks, not for developers looking for a recipe API or dataset to build on top of.
The iOS side isn't just a webview wrapper — CookCore is a separate, unit-tested Swift package with real domain logic: a recommender that scores recipes against what's in your fridge/pantry (Recommender.swift, Search.swift, StuffNormalizer.swift), serving-size scaling (RecipeAmounts, RecipeInstructionAmounts), and even an ingredient-incompatibility checker. The content pipeline is pragmatic: a Feishu spreadsheet edited by non-engineers, pulled and converted to JSON via a small CLI (pnpm fetch/convert), which is a reasonable way to keep recipe data decoupled from the app code without standing up a CMS.
It's Chinese-only by explicit project decision, so it's not a base to fork for other ingredient/language sets without rewriting the data layer. The WeChat mini-program variant was taken down entirely after being flagged for a platform violation (it linked out to Bilibili videos, judged as traffic diversion) — a reminder that a chunk of this project's distribution depends on rules it doesn't control and can vanish without warning. Cross-device sync for personal catalogs and private recipes is CloudKit-based, so it only works on iOS with an Apple account; web and Android users get no equivalent sync. And since recipe content lives in a spreadsheet rather than a reviewed/versioned data store, consistency and quality control depend entirely on manual spreadsheet discipline rather than any structural safeguard.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →