Your recipes aren't all in English. Your shopping list should keep up.

Most recipe apps are built as though everyone cooks from English recipes. Plenty of us don't. When part of your week comes from recipes in your own language and part of it from English ones, that assumption breaks in the one place it matters most — the list you shop from.

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What goes wrong in other apps

The same ingredient, written in two languages, becomes two lines. Plan an Indonesian rendang and an English roast in the same week and you get garam on one line and salt on another. Both are salt. You now own two salts, or you stand in the aisle doing the merge in your head — which was the job you installed the app to avoid.

It compounds with units, because measurements don't translate one-for-one either. Here is the shape of the problem, using the vocabulary Savory Simmer knows best today:

You'll see	It means	What a monolingual app does
`garam`	salt	separate line from "salt"
`bawang merah`	shallot	separate line from "shallot"
`bawang putih`	garlic	separate line from "garlic"
`siung`	clove (as a count)	unrecognized unit
`segenggam`	a handful	left untranslated in an English list

What Savory Simmer does instead

One vocabulary, more than one language. Ingredient names are normalized to a canonical form before anything is added up, so garam and salt become one line — with the totals combined, not just the labels tidied.
Units are understood, not guessed. siung is read as a count of cloves. Where two units genuinely aren't interchangeable, Savory Simmer keeps them apart rather than inventing a conversion — a clove is not a piece.
Non-numeric amounts survive. "to taste" and secukupnya stay as words instead of being silently dropped or turned into a zero.

Why this is built in rather than bolted on: the normalization runs before aggregation, in the same pass that adds up quantities. That's why the totals are right and not just the spelling — an app that merges labels after the fact still shows you the wrong number.

Which languages, honestly

Indonesian is where this started and where the vocabulary is deepest today, which is why every example above is Indonesian — we would rather show you something real than claim a list of languages we haven't built yet. The design is built to grow: each new language is more names pointing at the same canonical ingredient, not a rewrite. If you cook in a language we don't handle well yet, tell us which one — that is genuinely how the next one gets picked.

The rest still works the way you'd want

Capture from pasted text, a blog URL, or a photo of a cookbook page; plan your week by dragging; get one aisle-grouped list that recalculates whenever the plan changes. Your recipes stay private to your account — there is no public feed.

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