About East Coast Recipes

Our Aim

East Coast Recipes offers you access to over 3,000 delicious recipes created by talented chefs and authors and published in more than 40 East Coast cookbooks. Each recipe has been carefully edited and tested prior to publication. You’ll probably recognize many of our authors, and may even have some of these cookbooks on your shelves.

Our site gives you many great ways to quickly find recipes that meet your needs. Whether you’re looking to use up a specific ingredient or searching for low-salt recipes or recipes by your favourite chef, you can use our advanced search feature to find exactly what you’re looking for.

When you select a recipe, you’re seeing the page of the book in which the recipe is published. From there you can browse the rest of the book using our PDF book viewer tool. You can search within a single book or across the entire site to jump quickly from one book to another.

Our recipe selection

The recipes in this collection are all by respected cookbook authors, many of whom are notable Canadian chefs. Many of the recipes were collected from chefs and restaurants and compiled into collections by cookbook authors. Try searching for recipes from your favourite restaurants – there are also lots of great recipes from restaurants that are fondly remembered in Nova Scotia, but no longer with us.

Overall, you’ll find lots of recipes that feature local and affordable ingredients, and easy-to-make, delicious food. The recipes range from Maritime classics to modern and experimental twists from leading contemporary Canadian chefs. On our home page, you'll find a selection of curated shelves we're regularly updating to reflect regionally available seasonal produce, holidays, local traditions and more. We also spotlight local chefs and authors. You’ll find everything from classic desserts to vegan or gluten free dinners.

Using the site

When you view our recipes, you’re looking at PDFs displayed using our book viewer tool, which allows you to zoom in and out, turn pages, search within books, and even print recipe pages so you don’t need to put your device at risk when cooking a particularly messy meal.

When you find a recipe you’d like to read, click on the title or image to be taken to the book viewer. There you can turn pages by clicking the right-most or left-most side of the screen, like you’re flipping through a book! If you have any more questions, check out our FAQ page, and if you encounter any issues feel free to let us know through the addresses listed on our Contact page.

Copyright Issues

We’ve taken care of all copyright issues regarding giving library users access to books on the site. The license agreement for this site gives every user of a subscribing library the right to make unlimited use of the books in the collection for onscreen reading, as well as for printing recipes. There is no limit on simultaneous use of a book by all users, and no waiting to access books.

Print Versions

All the books in this collection began life in print format. Most remain in print and available today. Many will already be in the Halifax Public Library collection, or can be ordered for you.

Privacy and data collection

This site observes all Halifax Public Library policies regarding privacy and does not capture any data identifying individual users. We do count site visits and page views, but this data is all aggregated and is used only to allow us to see how many visitors the site receives, how many pages are viewed, and how long visitors spend on the site. There is no tracking of individual users or individual visits.