Save it now, cook it later — and remember that you did

You have 1,800 recipes saved. You cooked twelve of them. We know, because until this week the only way to record a cook was to open Cook Mode, tap Next through every single step, and reach the end.

That was never a cooking problem. Most people cook a saved recipe by propping the phone against the sugar tin and glancing at the ingredients. Every one of those dinners was invisible.

So now there is a button that says I made this, on every recipe, and it takes one tap.

The part that matters comes afterwards

Tap it and you are done — the cook is recorded. Everything else is optional and appears after, which is the whole trick. Ask for a note before somebody has eaten and you have built a form nobody fills in.

• A note. Halved the chilli. Twenty minutes, not thirty. The thing you will

have forgotten by the time you make it again.

• Who it was for. Mom and Dad. The twins. Book club. Just me.
• Would you make it again? Yes, or probably not.
• A photo, if you took one.

None of it is required. All of it is yours.

Then it starts telling you things

After a handful of entries your diary stops being a list and starts being a mirror.

Your regulars — the dishes you keep coming back to. Not the ones you saved, the ones you actually make. Most people are surprised by their own list.

Not for a while — a regular you have not cooked in a couple of months. This is the one that gets dinner sorted on a Tuesday when nothing sounds good.

Cook tonight — a dish you make often and have every ingredient for, right now. This is the one no other recipe app can do, because it needs to know both what is in your kitchen and what you actually cook.

And at the start of each month, your month in cooking: how many dinners, how many were new, who you cooked from, which dish you made most. There is a card you can post if you want to. There are no streaks, no badges and no goals, because a cooking streak breaks the first time you order a takeaway and nobody needs an app telling them they failed at dinner.

Would you make it again, actually does something

Say probably not about a dish and it stops appearing in Cook tonight, and it sinks on your suggestions screen even when your pantry is a perfect match for it. Say yes and it rises.

A rating that changes nothing is decoration. The point of asking is that the app listens.

And the cook who wrote it

If the recipe came from a creator, you can send them a photo of how it turned out — with your name and your note on it.

They will never get that anywhere else. A comment under a Reel is not proof that a stranger stood in their own kitchen and made the thing. This is.

On iPhone, iPad, Android and the web. Your diary is private; nobody sees it but you, and the only photo we will ever put on a shareable card is one you took yourself.