It’s based on two conventions:
- ingredients are linked to in the ingredients list, e.g.
1 cup of [[flour]] - all ingredients and only ingredients start with lowercase letter, so it’s possible to filter for ingredients with regex
^[a-z]
Combination of these two allows to make a view template that displays backlinks on missing ingredient tiddlers. Since the recipes have their own tag Recipe, it would be possible to check that these backlinks are only recipes.
Differentiating ingredients by name only (even if missing) would allow to construct a search step (for TW search or for Command Palette) that searches through ingredients only, so e.g. first search step displays recipes, the second displays ingredients.
I have modified the theme and Command Palette search a little bit, to get a decent search UI on a phone. Details and alternative approaches (using JD’s Mobile Layout or Thomas Elmiger’s Simple Seach) are discussed here: Mobile layout with easy-to-use search, alternatives to JD Mobile Layout.
I usually edit on PC and view on a phone when cooking or shopping. For a vertical phone screen, the simple recipe layout works well without any adjustments. I agree with your comment on Maple, on tablet screen it would be nice to have the screen space used efficiently.
With my way of linking to ingredients and having ingredients identified by first lowercase letter, it is possible to search links from a recipe and filter those that are ingredients. This does not strictly mean ingredients placed in the ingredients section, it could be an ingredient linked from the preparation section, but this shouldn’t be a problem.
Looking at my own thing from a perspective, I see that I have optimized the markup rules, so that I need as little “behind the scenes” code as possible, so that I can create and maintain it myself with little effort.
This is a quite opposite approach to the Recipes Plugin, which makes a lot behind the scenes, presents a custom UI for creating/editing/searching recipes. Advantage: little knowledge of the plugin and understanding of TW required to use. Disadvantage: limits freedom of having unstructured data (as pointed by @Springer).
I think we will have to balance between these two approaches in the Community Editions. That is, the more educative approach “see easy it was to do in TW (but you have to learn a few things how it works)” and more out-of-the-box approach “see this great, super simple to use web app for recipes made in TW (but don’t look inside, you wouldn’t understand)”.