Food is one of my favorite hobbies - both eating it and cooking it. Over the years I've accumulated shelves full of cookbooks, but these days they're gathering dust in a corner of my kitchen. The Web has replaced every one of them except for The Joy of Cooking, which I still prize for its "About..." introductory overviews.

The wealth of recipes on the Web is nothing short of astonishing. What's more, the wide variety of types of recipe websites is amazing, as well. There are large commercial sites, personal recipe collections, sites built by the submissions of people like you and me, and more. Much more. Let's take a look at some 47 recipe sites that I've visted over the past couple of years, and check out representative recipes from each of them.

Submission Sites

These sites were quite possibly the first "Web 2.0" sites that the Web spawned - meaning that their collections are compiled from submissions by their visitors. As such, they can be wildly inconsistent, but most of them contain nuggets of pure culinary genius.

Cooks.com

Here's the mothership, the 800-pound gorilla, the big kid on the block. Its gigantic collection definitely ranks in the aforementioned "wildly inconsistent" category, but enjoy an afternoon perusing its 25 categories, and you're sure to find a gem to cook that evening. After all, what other site can boast 205 different recipes for "Porcupine meatballs?"

Focus: Broad range; good ethnic-food representation

Sample: Yummy Porcupine Meatballs

Recipe Archives
This is primarily a collection of recipes from the Usenet newsgroup rec.food.recipes, plus the occasional recipe from other rec.* and alt.* food and cooking-related newsgroups, such as rec.food.preserving and alt.food.sushi; cf "inconsistent," above.
Focus: Broad range; good ethnic-food representation
Sample: North Carolina Chopped Barbecue

Recipe Source
This giant submissions site holds well over 70,000 recipes, and has a great collection of often-obscure ethnic recipes.
Focus: Broad range; good ethnic-food representation
Sample: Ryba W Sosie Chrzanowym (Polish for Fish in Horseradish)

Recipe Spin
At a mere (?!) 7,190 recipes, this site isn't as comprehensive as some, but its fine ethnic-recipe collection makes it well worth a visit - though finding some more-obscure ingredients might be frustrating.
Focus: Broad range; good ethnic-food representation
Sample: La Paz Batchoy (Filipino pork dish)

VegWeb.com
Vegetarian cooking may not be your cup of miso, but there are more than a few treats hiding on the pages of this sunny site.
Focus: Vegetarian
Sample: Just Like Chicken Strips

Next: Submission Sites (continued)