Food and Dining

Food52

pp-food52

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

Printed by @tmchow (Trevin Chow)

Install

npx — recommended

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press-library install food52

Installs the CLI binary and the agent skill (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, and more). Add --cli-only or --skill-only for one half. Requires Node.

Hermes

hermes skills install mvanhorn/printing-press-library/cli-skills/pp-food52 --force

From the Hermes CLI. Inside a chat session use /skills install with the same path.

OpenClaw

Install the pp-food52 skill from https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library/tree/main/cli-skills/pp-food52. The skill defines how its required CLI can be installed.

Paste this to your OpenClaw agent — the skill describes how to install its CLI.

Claude Desktop

This CLI ships an MCPB bundle. Download the latest release .mcpb and double-click it — Claude Desktop walks you through the install.

View source on GitHub →

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

Every recipe and article on Food52, queryable without a browser. Ships with pantry match (find recipes from what you already have), search (offline FTS over your synced cookbook), recipes top (Test-Kitchen approved + rating-floored), and scale (resize ingredient lists via JSON-LD). The only existing Food52 CLI is a 2018-era Ruby HTML scraper that no longer runs against today's Vercel-protected site; this is a clean rebuild on Surf with Chrome TLS impersonation.

Learn more at Food52.

Authentication

No Food52 sign-in required. Food52 sits behind Vercel bot mitigation, but the challenge is passive (TLS-fingerprint), not JS-active — Surf with Chrome impersonation clears it without cookies or setup. Search uses a Typesense search-only key the CLI auto-discovers from Food52's public JS bundle, so users never see a key prompt or env var.

Quick Start

# Live Typesense search; sub-second results.
food52-pp-cli recipes search "brownies" --limit 5 --json

# Full structured recipe (ingredients, steps, ratings, kitchen notes) for one recipe.
food52-pp-cli recipes get sarah-fennel-s-best-lunch-lady-brownie-recipe --json

# Seed the local store with two tags worth of recipes — required for offline search and pantry match.
food52-pp-cli sync recipes chicken vegetarian --limit 100

# Tell the CLI what's in your kitchen.
food52-pp-cli pantry add chicken garlic lemon thyme

# Find synced recipes you can mostly make right now.
food52-pp-cli pantry match --min-coverage 0.6 --json

# Clean cooking-friendly view, ready to pipe to lp or paste.
food52-pp-cli print sarah-fennel-s-best-lunch-lady-brownie-recipe

Unique Features

These capabilities aren't available in any other tool for this API.

Local state that compounds

pantry match — Find Food52 recipes whose ingredients overlap your local pantry, ranked by coverage.

Reach for this when the user asks 'what can I make with what I have' rather than searching for one dish at a time.
```
food52-pp-cli pantry match --min-coverage 0.7 --json
```
search — Full-text search across every recipe and article you have synced, with type filtering.

Use this for lookups that can't justify a Typesense round trip or when offline.
```
food52-pp-cli search "miso" --type recipe --json
```
sync recipes — Pull recipes for one or more tags into the local FTS-indexed store.

Run before pantry match or offline search to seed the local cookbook.
```
food52-pp-cli sync recipes chicken vegetarian --limit 100
```
articles for-recipe — Find synced articles that mention a given recipe in their relatedReading.

Use when the user wants the editorial context behind a recipe they've found.
```
food52-pp-cli articles for-recipe sarah-fennel-s-best-lunch-lady-brownie-recipe
```

Editorial signals others ignore

recipes top — Show only Food52 Test-Kitchen-approved recipes for a tag, with a rating floor.

Pick this over a broad search when the user wants 'a recipe Food52's editors signed off on,' not just any community recipe.
```
food52-pp-cli recipes top chicken --min-rating 4 --limit 5 --json
```

Recipe transforms

scale — Scale a recipe's ingredients to a different number of servings using its Schema.org recipeYield.

Use when the user is cooking for a different headcount than the recipe's default yield.
```
food52-pp-cli scale mom-s-japanese-curry-chicken-with-radish-and-cauliflower --servings 8 --json
```
print — Render a recipe as ingredients + numbered steps with no nav, no images, no ads, no comments — ready to pipe to lp or paste into notes.

Use when the user wants to actually cook from the recipe rather than browse it.
```
food52-pp-cli print sarah-fennel-s-best-lunch-lady-brownie-recipe
```

Usage

Run food52-pp-cli --help for the full command reference and flag list.

Commands

articles

Browse and read Food52 stories (articles) from the food and life verticals

food52-pp-cli articles browse - Browse the latest Food52 articles in a vertical (food, life)
food52-pp-cli articles get - Get a Food52 article (story) by slug

recipes

Browse Food52 recipes by tag and fetch single recipe details (extracted from Next.js NEXT_DATA embedded in SSR HTML)

food52-pp-cli recipes browse - Browse Food52 recipes filtered by a tag (e.g. chicken, breakfast, vegetarian)
food52-pp-cli recipes get - Get full structured details for a single Food52 recipe by slug

Output Formats

# Human-readable table (default in terminal, JSON when piped)
food52-pp-cli articles get best-mothers-day-gift-ideas

# JSON for scripting and agents
food52-pp-cli articles get best-mothers-day-gift-ideas --json

# Filter to specific fields
food52-pp-cli articles get best-mothers-day-gift-ideas --json --select id,name,status

# Dry run — show the request without sending
food52-pp-cli articles get best-mothers-day-gift-ideas --dry-run

# Agent mode — JSON + compact + no prompts in one flag
food52-pp-cli articles get best-mothers-day-gift-ideas --agent

Agent Usage

This CLI is designed for AI agent consumption:

Non-interactive - never prompts, every input is a flag
Pipeable - --json output to stdout, errors to stderr
Filterable - --select id,name returns only fields you need
Previewable - --dry-run shows the request without sending
Read-only by default - this CLI does not create, update, delete, publish, send, or mutate remote resources
Offline-friendly - sync/search commands can use the local SQLite store when available
Agent-safe by default - no colors or formatting unless --human-friendly is set

Exit codes: 0 success, 2 usage error, 3 not found, 5 API error, 7 rate limited, 10 config error.

Use as MCP Server

This CLI ships a companion MCP server for use with Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible tools.

Claude Code

claude mcp add food52 food52-pp-mcp

Claude Desktop

Add to your Claude Desktop config (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "food52": {
      "command": "food52-pp-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Health Check

food52-pp-cli doctor

Verifies configuration and connectivity to the API.

Configuration

Config file: ~/.config/food52-pp-cli/config.toml

Troubleshooting

Not found errors (exit code 3)

Check the resource ID is correct
Run the list command to see available items

API-specific

HTTP 429 or 'Vercel Security Checkpoint' on every request — Confirm you are running the printed CLI (which uses Surf + Chrome impersonation) and not your own curl. Plain HTTP is blocked by design; the CLI's transport handles it.
recipes search returns 'Typesense key discovery failed' — Run food52-pp-cli doctor — it re-fetches the public _app.js bundle. Food52 rotates the bundle hash on each deploy; the CLI auto-recovers.
recipes get returns 404 for a slug that exists — Food52 sometimes renames slugs. Try recipes search '<title-fragment>' to find the current canonical slug.
pantry match returns nothing — Run sync recipes <tag> first — pantry match operates on the synced store, not the live site. Try food52-pp-cli search to confirm sync wrote rows.

HTTP Transport

This CLI uses Chrome-compatible HTTP transport for browser-facing endpoints. It does not require a resident browser process for normal API calls.

Discovery Signals

This CLI was generated with browser-captured traffic analysis.

Target observed: https://food52.com/
Capture coverage: 0 API entries from 0 total network entries
Reachability: browser_http (95% confidence)
Protocols: ssr_embedded_data (100% confidence), next_data_json (100% confidence), rest_json (100% confidence), schema_org_jsonld (100% confidence)
Auth signals: none
Protection signals: vercel_bot_mitigation_passive_tls (100% confidence)
Generation hints: browser_http_transport
Candidate command ideas: recipes search; recipes browse; recipes get; tags list; verticals list; articles browse; articles get

Warnings from discovery:

scope_note: Hotline (/hotline, /hotline/questions/) returns only siteSettings in pageProps and renders no question/answer data in the DOM. The community Q&A is effectively unreachable for unauthenticated read scrapers. Excluded from CLI scope.
scope_note: Shop endpoints exist on shop.food52.com and food52.myshopify.com/api/2025-01/graphql.json but require Shopify Storefront API token discovery; deferred from v1.
scope_note: buildId (Pq8fQj0nm7uTx90i5u0si at the time of browser-sniff) and _app.js bundle hash change on every Food52 deploy. The CLI's runtime discovery (buildId from NEXT_DATA.buildId, key from regex over the active _app-.js) handles rotation transparently.
scope_note: Typesense /collections endpoint requires the admin key (search-only key returns 403 there). The CLI does not list collections; it queries the known collection name 'recipes_production_food52_current' directly.

Sources & Inspiration

This CLI was built by studying these projects and resources:

hhursev/recipe-scrapers — Python (1900 stars)
imRohan/food52-cli — Ruby

Generated by CLI Printing Press