Skill

food52

Search, browse, and read Food52 from your terminal — with offline FTS, pantry matching, recipe scaling, and the editorial signals other tools throw away.

Verified: 2026-05-13 (printing-press-ingest-2026-05-13+enrich-capability-skill)

When to use food52

Choose if

You're building a cooking, meal-planning, or pantry-driven agent that needs editorial recipe content (Test-Kitchen-approved tags, editor's picks) without burning tokens on web scraping or browser automation. Offline FTS + pantry-overlap matching + recipe-scaling are first-class, and no API key or paid account is required.

Avoid if

You need recipes outside Food52's catalog — the CLI doesn't aggregate across food blogs, only the Food52 site. Also avoid if you need community Q&A hotline content (unreachable for unauthenticated scrapers) or shop / commerce flows (deferred). Heavy concurrent workloads may trip 429s or the Vercel Security Checkpoint.

Risk Flags

  • MEDIUM data_quality Food52's web bundle hash (buildId and _app.js) rotates on every deploy, so the CLI re-discovers the public Typesense key at runtime. If Food52 changes its discovery pattern, lookups break until the upstream is patched.
  • MEDIUM rate_limit Heavy agent workloads can trip HTTP 429 or hit the Vercel Security Checkpoint on every request. No published threshold; pace your queries or rely on the offline SQLite store for repeated reads.
  • LOW scope Read-only — does not create, update, delete, publish, send, or mutate remote resources. Community Q&A hotline is excluded (unreachable for unauthenticated scrapers) and Shop endpoints are deferred pending Shopify Storefront API token discovery.
  • LOW data_quality Food52 sometimes renames recipe slugs, so cached URLs may 404 between syncs. Modifying the tool may break the passive TLS fingerprinting protection that keeps requests from being challenged.

Cost

Type: Free · Free tier: The CLI is MIT-licensed and free to install. No Food52 account or API key is required — the Typesense key is auto-discovered from the public Food52 web bundle.

Install

Default

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press install food52

Setup docs →

Estimated time to first success: ~5 min

Dependencies

Minimum runtime: Node.js (for npx) or Go 1.26.3+ (source fallback)

Distribution

Repository
https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library
License
MIT