reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/10/86)
Last week the keepers of the European gateway started sending mod.recipes to Europe. I am pleased by this, as it will expand the scope of our recipes and our readership. However, I have received a torrent of complaints about how parochial the recipes are, and a lot of criticism for them not being phrased in European units. * Most Americans have never even SEEN a cookbook that uses European or metric units. I certainly haven't. I own 300 to 400 cookbooks, and not one of them follows the "international conventions" that the new European readers of this newsgroup have been heatedly telling me about. * Every recipe ever submitted to mod.recipes was submitted from North America, and was submitted using the units and measurements that were comfortable for its submittor. Although I spend a lot of time editing and checking each recipe, if I have to do unit conversion it will require a lot more of my time. I am not eager to spend more time editing recipes, though I am willing to do it if no automatic solution can be found. * It would be nice if the recipes would all use a single uniform set of units, but that is not likely, because virtually no American kitchens have any form of measuring devices except cups and teaspoons; I suspect that almost no European kitchens have any form of measuring devices except liters and grams. If I switched mod.recipes over to metric units, its usefulness to the American cook would be greatly reduced. However, if I don't switch over to metric units, its usefulness to the European cook will be diminished. In my copious free time, I am going to look into writing an automatic conversion program to perform unit transformation. I believe that I have been sufficiently consistent with respect to the spelling and punctuation of the recipes that a simple string-substitution system will suffice. Readers outside North America: I would like to ask for your help. Could you please take one recipe, any recipe, and edit it so that it conforms to your ideas of what a recipe should be like, and mail it back to me. Once a few of these come in, I will form an impression of what European recipes should be like; I will then try to design a conversion program. Of course, if there is a hacker who loves to cook, and who knows how to do this translation, sitting idle somewhere in Europe, I'm always happy to have somebody else do this work. I would also be very interested in learning what kind of measuring devices are in your European kitchens. Do you have measuring spoons? What units do they measure? CC's? What does a typical set of spoons contain? Do you have a 2-CC spoon and a 5-CC spoon? I don't want to know what is available, I want to know what people really use. What does your mother use to measure when she is making a sauce?