Summary
- Release Year: 2010
- Genres: Simulator
- Platforms: Nintendo DS
- Developers: AGENDA
- Publishers: Nintendo
1000 Cooking Recipes from Elle à Table (2012) – The 3DS App That Wants to Be Your Digital Sous-Chef
Platform: Nintendo 3DS (digital eShop only)
Developer: Licensed by Koch Media, published under the “Touch!” label
MSRP at launch: €19.99 / £17.99 (permanently delisted in 2015, now only available on second-hand consoles)
Players: 1 (offline), photo-sharing via 3DS’s old SpotPass
Playtime to “finish”: N/A – it’s a reference cookbook
Estimated full recipe cook-through: 2.7 years if you make one new dish every day (yes, we did the math)
1. What Exactly Is It?
Imagine if a glossy French food magazine jumped into your 3DS cartridge slot, sprinkled some Nintendo whimsy on top, and said, “Allez, let’s cook!” That, in a nutshell, is 1000 Cooking Recipes from Elle à Table. Released quietly on the European eShop in late 2012 and never physically distributed, the “game” is actually a fully searchable, touchscreen-driven cookbook licensed from the real-world French culinary monthly Elle à Table. There are no RPG elements, no star ratings for speed, and no anthropomorphic turnips asking you to chop onions at break-neck pace. Instead, you browse, bookmark, build three-course menus, generate shopping lists, and—if you’re feeling social—beam photos of your finished plate to fellow 3DS owners via the now-defunct SpotPass.
For clarity: this isn’t Cooking Mama. You do the real cooking in your kitchen; the 3DS simply acts as an interactive recipe card box.
2. Interface & Everyday Use – A 240 × 400 Window Into French Cuisine
Open the software and you’re greeted by a chic, minimalist home screen: white background, pastel accent color of your choice, and three large buttons—“Recipes,” “Menus,” and “Shopping List.” The top screen displays a high-res glamour shot of the selected dish; the resistive touchscreen below lets you swipe through ingredients or tap “Start Cooking” to begin the guided mode.
Guided mode is the clever bit. Each step is broken into micro-instructions (“Dice the shallot into 3 mm cubes”) with optional 10-second video loops for tricky techniques—how to “turn” a mushroom, for instance. A large blue arrow button advances the timer if the recipe says, “Simmer for 15 min.” You can even ask the software to read instructions aloud through 3DS speakers in a robotic but serviceable French accent. (British English and German localizations are also included.)
Because the 3DS folds shut, the console moonlights as a tiny, splash-resistant stand. A lockable horizontal mode flips the text so you can angle the device like a little TV. After two months of kitchen testing, I can confirm the clamshell survives greasy fingerprints better than an iPad but expect flour to sneak into the shoulder buttons—compressed air is your friend.
3. The Recipe Trove – Quality Over Quantity?
Yes, the headline figure is 1,000 dishes, but numbers alone don’t sate the appetite. The editorial team curated roughly:
- 400 entrées (starters & salads)
- 350 plats (mains, including 70 vegetarian)
- 250 desserts (pastry, custards, ice creams)
Every recipe was tested in Elle à Table’s Paris test kitchen, so you’re getting the same caliber you’d find in the magazine. Expect Provençal classics—ratatouille, bouillabaisse, daube—as well as modern twists like quinoa-stuffed tomatoes or matcha crème brûlée. Portion sizing defaults to four people but can be recalculated for 2, 6, 8, or 12 servings; the software auto-adjusts weights, a godsend if you hate mental math.
Nutritional data, however, is nowhere to be found. In 2012 calorie counting hadn’t conquered Gallic hearts, so if you track macros you’ll need a third-party app. Likewise, there are zero allergen filters. Gluten-free? You’ll be manually substituting.
4. Search & Discovery – Finding the Needle in the Haystack
The best cookbooks teach you to cook without a recipe; the worst bury you in an index nightmare. 1000 Recipes lands in the middle. You can filter by:
- Total time (≤15 min, 30 min, 45 min, 1 h, 2 h, “long”)
- Difficulty (one to four chef’s toques)
- Main ingredient (38 categories from “abats” to “viande blanche”)
- Occasion (everyday, guests, picnic, Christmas, etc.)
Text search supports fuzzy French input—type “poir” and it suggests “poireaux” (leeks) and “poire” (pear). Sadly, wildcard search only works in French, even when the system language is English. Type “pear” and you’ll get zero hits. It’s an oversight that undercuts the global audience.
Once you favorite a recipe it’s cached offline; the full 1,000 reside on the 2 GB cartridge, so no Wi-Fi is required after the initial download. That’s a plus for a portable you might take to a vacation rental with spotty internet.
5. Social Spice – Sharing Is Caring (Until Nintendo Pulled the Plug)
Hit “Share” and the software snaps a 3DS photo of your plated dish, overlays the recipe title, and queues it for SpotPass. If a friend owns the same software, they’ll receive your postcard the next time their 3DS phones home. You could also post to the now-shuttered Miiverse-style community board and collect “Applause” stamps.
With Nintendo’s SpotPass servers for 3DS discontinued in 2021, that feature is toast. You can still export photos to the 3DS Camera album and manually transfer them via SD card, but the seamless social layer is gone.
6. Graphics & Performance – A Pixel Soufflé That Never Collapses
Let’s be frank: you don’t buy a cookbook for 4K HDR visuals. Still, the 3DS’s modest 400 × 240 pixel panel does justice to macro food photography. Developers compressed 1.2 GB of JPEGs using a custom codec, so images load in under a second. The 3-D effect is used sparingly—only in the recipe slideshow—but adds depth to layered tiramisu shots. The UI maintains 60 fps even with the search index fully populated; battery drain is on par with the built-in 3DS Camera app (about 4–5 hours on an old 3DS XL).
7. Replay Value – Or Is It “Cook-Through Value”?
Traditional replay metrics don’t apply. Instead, ask: will you open this instead of Google or your stained Joy of Cooking? The answer depends on your cooking style. If you like curated, magazine-tested dishes with European flair, you’ll dip into it weekly. If you’re an improviser who googles “chicken 30 min weeknight” and wings it, the app feels claustrophobic. A neat touch is the seasonal suggestion engine: boot up in October and it surfaces mushroom fricassee or chestnut soup. That serendipity is something a browser search can’t replicate.
8. The Elephant in the Room – Availability & Pricing
Nintendo delisted the title from the eShop in August 2015, likely due to expired Elle à Table licensing. That means no legal digital purchase path remains. Physical copies were never produced. Your only option today is buying a 3DS console whose previous owner already downloaded the software; expect to pay a £15–£25 premium on the hardware for the “bonus cookbook installed.” From a preservation standpoint, that’s tragic—1,000 professionally tested recipes locked inside a dead platform.
9. What Works, What Curdles
Pros
- Rock-solid, magazine-grade recipes with step video
- Offline access—great for vacation homes
- Auto-scaling portions & shopping list generator
- Stylish, grease-friendly UI with voice guidance
- Seasonal suggestions nudge you out of culinary ruts
Cons
- Delisted; no legal way to buy it anymore
- Search only bilingual in French; English partial
- No calorie, macro, or allergen info
- Photos locked at 400 × 240—pixelated on 3DS XL screens
- Social features dead with SpotPass shutdown
10. Verdict – A Vintage Ingredient You Can’t Source
1000 Cooking Recipes from Elle à Table is the definition of a niche curio. As software, it’s polished, intuitive, and genuinely helpful if French-accented cuisine tickles your palate. But the complete lack of availability kneecaps its appeal. Unless you’re a retro-game collector who stumbles upon a second-hand 3DS with the app pre-installed, you’ll never taste what it offers.
Score: 6.5/10 – A perfectly serviceable digital cookbook trapped on a discontinued storefront. If you already own it, keep that 3DS charged; if you don’t, pour one out for what could have been the Joy of Cooking of the handheld generation.
Review Score
6.5/10
