one where only the recipes themselves are listed... Going through all the books to find a specific recipe is tedious.
Totally agree, but I get the feeling Larian is only listing the complete text of each book on purpose to avoid too much "hand-holding." But again, I'd prefer they just extract the actual recipes and list only those in one place in the journal - I'm just going to have to search for them on the internet otherwise anyway.
Well then as I said, let me write those down myself. Being able to take notes in game would be great either way.
Ideally you could "create" pages or alter existing ones.
After that the Recipe Tab should be changed to include all written documents the player reads. Of course it would need to be Categorized a bit to avoid a massive clusterfuck, but it certainly doesn't seem like a very complex request.