Methodology
Plan the meal, not the recipe.
A spread is what Meshi calls a multi-recipe meal: Thanksgiving dinner, a Saturday brunch, a four-course date night. The unit of planning is the occasion, not the dish. Recipes are the building blocks; the spread is the thing you actually serve.
Why recipes alone aren't enough
Every recipe app gives you a recipe. Few of them know what to do when you're cooking five of them for one dinner. The shopping list duplicates ingredients across recipes. The timing isn't coordinated. The prep that could happen yesterday gets squeezed into today. Each recipe is treated as if it lives alone — and the meal is left to you to assemble.
That's a fine model for a Tuesday weeknight. It's a bad model for the dinners that actually matter. The dinners that matter are spreads.
What a spread does
One date, many recipes
Start by naming the occasion: "Thanksgiving 2026," "Mom's birthday brunch." Pick a date and time. Add recipes. The spread becomes a container — when you open it the day-of, every recipe in it is there, in the order you'll cook them.
Split across cook sessions
A spread can have one cook session or several. The cranberry sauce two days ahead; the stuffing the morning of; the turkey and gravy three hours before. Each session is a Cook Stack of its own — the recipes inside it cook in parallel — but they're grouped under the spread that holds them all together.
One shopping list, deduplicated
Meshi rolls up the ingredients across every recipe in the spread, deduplicates "butter" appearing in three recipes into one line ("1 lb butter"), and groups by aisle. You don't shop for five recipes. You shop for one spread.
A Saturday brunch, as a spread
You're hosting four friends Saturday at 11. The spread contains a sourdough bake, a shakshuka, candied bacon, and a fruit salad. You create a Friday-evening session for the sourdough proof and the bacon (which keeps overnight) and a Saturday-morning session for the shakshuka and fruit.
Friday night, Meshi opens the Cook Stack for that session — sourdough and bacon side by side, timers running together. Saturday at 9:30, you start the morning session. The shakshuka pan is on the heat while you cut fruit; the timer rail at the top shows you both clocks. By 10:50 everything's plated. You haven't looked at five different recipes — you've cooked one spread.
The shopping list went from "what do I need for sourdough, shakshuka, bacon, and fruit?" to a single deduplicated grocery run on Thursday.
The thing recipes alone can't do
Spreads are how Meshi treats meal planning as a first-class object — not a tag on a recipe, not a meta-recipe, but its own concept with its own data model and its own surfaces. Sessions are how the spread maps to time. Cook Stack is how each session maps to attention. Shopping lists are how the spread maps to the store.
When the meal is the unit, the work that doesn't need to happen on the day stops happening on the day. That's what makes hosting feel less like a sprint and more like a series of deliberate steps.