seb@ahutb.UUCP (s.e.badian) (04/10/85)
Last week I posted an article asking what other people did to organize their recipes. I've gotten some mail about this, so it seems to be a problem of general interest to quite a few cooks out there(the ones with cookbook collections like mine, no doubt). To answer all the questions in the mail I received, I decided to post another article on the subject. I have started my own rudimentary database which contains just a small fraction of the information in each recipe I'm inter- ested in. I didn't want to store all the data I thought I might need since space is not free. There is a lot of it here on our amdahl, but I don't want to be accused to being a pig just so I can reference my recipes. So I decided to store only the main ingredients(this depends on the recipe), how long it will take to prepare(over 2 hours is slow, everything else is fast),the title of the recipe, what cookbook or magazine I can find it in, and whether I've cooked it before or not. Since I don't key all recipes on ingredients, I store things be- sides the ingredients in the ingredients field. For instance, for dessarts, if the type of dessart isn't mentioned in the title, I put it in the ingredients field(like pie or cake). I've divided recipes into a number of types and I have a file for each type. The types are meat(main dishes), poultry, fish, veggie, other(main dishes), dessarts, condiments, beverages, breads, side dishes, appetizers, and soups.Right now the system is a collection of very simple shell routines. When I get the chance, I'll build something more sophisticated. It works well enough for now. The biggest problem is inputing the data, of course. Even with the limited data I'm interested in, it takes a long time to go through a cookbook. There isn't mush help for that problem until someone can teach a computer to read and interpret recipes. If anyone out there is more interested in this scheme, send me mail and I'll elaborate. I have to admit that this system is still in it infancy and I haven't knocked a lot of the kinks out. It comes with no guarantees. It fits one person's requirements - mine. Sharon Badian ihnp4!hocsp!ahutb!seb