List the categories Ptitchef browses its recipes by. Called without arguments it returns the families of ingredients; pass a family's slug as 'family' to list the categories it holds. Read this before building an address by hand: the site writes its slugs freely, so the same vegetable appears as 'chou-kale' on one line and as 'recette-de-petits-pois' on the next, and a slug that was guessed lands on a page the site does not hold. Each entry carries the slug to pass back and the page to open.

Search recipes on Ptitchef by dish or ingredient. The site answers in one of two ways and the answer says which: it either sends the search to a category page of its own, whose total counts what that category holds, or it answers on its own terms on a single page whose total is the number of rows served. When a category answered, 'topic_slug' names it and browse_recipes reads its further pages. Some topics come back as a guide the site wrote instead, grouped under headings of its own and carrying no total; browse_recipes on the same 'topic_slug' reads their full listing. A search the site matched nothing for comes back with no row and a total of zero, which is an absence the site stated.

Read the recipes under one category of Ptitchef, page by page, or one of the lists the site keeps standing. Pass 'category' with a slug from list_categories or from a search's 'topic_slug', or pass 'listing' for one of: latest, top_rated, most_viewed. Never build a category slug by hand: the site writes them freely and answers an address it does not hold by serving another page. The page in the answer is the one the site served, which is the first page again when the page asked for is past the last one.

Find Ptitchef recipes from the ingredients a cook already has. Give one to 5 ingredients in French, as a cook would name them ("poulet", "citron"). The site counts every recipe it finds and serves one page of them, so 'total_available' can be far larger than the rows returned, and the rest cannot be reached. A longer list than the site's own form reads is refused rather than sent and silently cut.

Read one Ptitchef recipe: its ingredients, method, times, rating, nutrition and the cost the site estimates for it. Pass the 'id' of a row from search_recipes, browse_recipes or search_by_ingredients. Give 'servings' to rescale the ingredients, and read each line's 'scaling' before quoting a quantity: 'scaled' is exact arithmetic, 'rounded' was moved to stay usable, and 'unscaled' carries nothing that could be multiplied. A time or a figure the site publishes none of comes back null, never zero.

Rescale a list of ingredient lines to a different number of servings, without contacting any website. Give either 'factor' directly, or 'from_servings' and 'to_servings' and the factor is computed. Works on any French ingredient list, whatever its source, so it also serves a recipe pasted in by hand. Quantities in grams or millilitres are multiplied and rounded to readable values; a countable thing lands on a half when half of one can be poured, weighed or cut, as a boîte, a sachet, a feuille de gélatine or a cuillère can, and on a whole one when it cannot, as an oeuf, a jaune or a blanc; approximate measures such as a pinch or a handful have their count multiplied in whole units and stay in their own vocabulary. A line writing an article where a digit would go, as in 'un bouchon de rhum' or 'une pincée de sel', is read as one of that measure. Lines carrying no quantity are returned untouched and flagged. Prefer this over doing the arithmetic yourself.

List the other languages a Ptitchef recipe was published in, with the page of each. get_recipe already carries this list under 'translations', so call this one only where the rest of the recipe is not wanted. Pass the 'id' of a row from a search or a listing. The pairing is the site's own: each page names its counterparts, and this repeats those names rather than matching titles. How many there are belongs to the recipe: a recent one names more than twenty, from German to Hindi, and an older one names none. An empty list is what the site published, and the read succeeded.