mcp-wikibooks-cookbook

The Cookbook is the recipe collection of the English Wikibooks, a Wikimedia project. Thousands of recipes are written and maintained there in the open, each with its ingredients, the equipment it calls for, its steps, the tips and variations its authors added, and the categories it files itself under: a cuisine, a kind of dish, a main ingredient. The pages are published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.

This server connects a chat client to that collection. You can search the recipes by dish or by ingredient, list them by cuisine, kind of dish or main ingredient, read one with its ingredients rescaled to the number of people at your table, and rescale any ingredient list of your own. It needs no API key and no account.

Version française

Install

One-click install

Claude Code

claude mcp add wikibooks-cookbook -- npx -y mcp-wikibooks-cookbook

Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any client using the standard config format

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wikibooks-cookbook": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-wikibooks-cookbook"]
    }
  }
}

Node 24 or later is required, and no environment variable has to be set.

With Docker

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wikibooks-cookbook": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/smeet666/mcp-wikibooks-cookbook:2.0.1"]
    }
  }
}

-i keeps stdin open, which is where the protocol travels, and -t is left out because a TTY rewrites the stream. The container needs outbound HTTPS to api.wikimedia.org, and nothing else: no volume, no port, no credential.

Bundle, without npm

Download mcp-wikibooks-cookbook-2.0.1.mcpb from the latest release and open it. A client that supports MCP bundles installs it on its own, with no npm and no configuration file to edit. The bundle carries its dependencies, so nothing is fetched at install time.

What you can ask

• "Find me a carbonara recipe in the Cookbook."
• "Read it for six people instead of four."
• "What Thai soups does the collection hold?"
• "Which recipes are built on lentils?"
• "Scale this ingredient list by 2.5 for me."

The ordinary path runs from a search to a reading: a row carries an id, the page key, and get_recipe takes that key.

Tools

search_recipes

Searches the Cookbook, either across the whole text of its pages or across their titles alone.

In return: rows carrying id, the page key get_recipe takes; title; url; image_url; description, the short gloss the wiki keeps for a page; and excerpt, the matching passage with the highlight markup taken off. Each of the last three is null where the search offered none. total_available is always null: the search route publishes no total and no paging, so result_count counts the rows this call returned.

get_recipe

Reads one recipe, and rescales its ingredients when a number of servings is given.

In return: title, url, ingredients, equipment, steps, tips for the notes and variations the page publishes, prep_minutes, cook_minutes, total_minutes, time_text in the page's own wording, time_phases, category and categories for every category the page files itself under. A figure the page states nothing for is null. id names the page that was read, which differs from the key asked for after a redirect, and redirected_from then names the key that led there. yield says what the recipe was written for and what it was rescaled to, and each ingredient carries scaling, reading scaled, rounded or unscaled.

scale_ingredients

Applies the same arithmetic to any list of ingredient lines, with no request to the wiki.

Pass factor, or the from_servings and to_servings pair.

In return: the factor used, the rescaled ingredients in the shape get_recipe returns, and scaled_count, rounded_count and unscaled_count.

list_recipes

Lists recipes along the categories the Cookbook files them under. The arguments combine, and the answer says which search was built from them.