reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/20/86)
I've gotten several dozen messages from mod.recipes readers in Europe, Japan, and Australia, and another dozen from refugee Europeans at US universities. I have from this concluded that any form of automatic translation of recipes will be utterly impossible. I have been told about 5 or 6 different systems of metric measurement, 2 or 3 different meanings of words like "cup" and "spoon", and I've been told by an amazing number of people that although their country is metric, they still think in terms of teaspoons and cups when they cook. I hereby decree the following new policies for mod.recipes: * Each recipe will be in the system of units offered by its submittor. If a recipe comes from Japan and calls for "2 smaller spoons of miso", then that is the way it will go out. * As soon as I can, I will update the monthly postings to include translation tables to and from the systems of measurements that are used in various countries. I now have the Japanese, Danish, Swedish, English, and Swiss words for standard measuring instruments; I'd like to get similar information for French, Dutch, and Italian. * I will no longer send out recipes that call for ingredient quantities based on U.S. packaging conventions (e.g. 1 can of soup). I have tried to remove as many of these as possible, but now I will remove all of them. Often I can fix this myself, but sometimes I will have to send a recipe back to its submittor for repair or revision. * I will try hard not to send out recipes using ingredients that are peculiar to North America. I am fairly familiar with ingredient availability in France, but I don't know much about other countries. I entreat you all to let me know when a recipe goes out asking for an ingredient that you don't know about or can't get. I've been toying with the idea of imposing a ban on recipes calling for canned soup. I don't think I'll do it, though. On the one hand, canned soup is pretty low-class stuff, and recipes that call for dumping a can of some soup on top of some other ingredient are rarely considered high-quality. On the other hand, I know that many people really cook and eat these recipes, because they are simple, cheap, and quick. And they aren't in any cookbooks, for the very reason that they are often considered low-class. But you know, my own favorite recipe for tuna casserole calls for 2 cans of cream of celery soup, and I make that casserole on days when I'm feeling too tired to cook "real" food: I'm not about to make a celery white-sauce for it. But what do people in other countries do for canned soup? -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA