A very nifty feature of Chef is the ability to include recipes from one cookbook with another. This way, we can create cookbooks with a purpose, like a product or an end result. An example of such a cookbook could be an application cookbook named MyCloudApp, with calls to, or inclusions of, other cookbooks such as Apache, MySQL, or any other cookbook it might need.

Until now, we added recipe after recipe to the run list of our host. This is not optimal, and less than desirable when managing a lot of nodes. The idea here is to create a new cookbook dedicated to an imaginary MySite application, that will reference and depend on all the other recipes, so we can only load this MySite cookbook and be done with it.