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Text ©1989 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.
Created: Wed, 12 May 2004 at 14:33:26 UTC
Wow. Uh—hello there. My name is Peter Schickele and I teach at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople—
No, wrong beginning . . . .
My name is Sam Waring, in case you’ve forgotten, and I work for a large city government. I also sometimes write a column on cooking and food here, but lately I haven’t been been very motivated to cook or to write about cooking, either one, so columns have been pretty thin on the ground. However! I’ve recently been feeling better about wandering into a kitchen for more than a PB&J sandwich, so maybe I’ll start appearing more regularly.
All this hiatus in cooking and writing doesn’t mean that I haven’t been reading a lot and doing something about cooking, though. I have done both, but it all seems to get tangled up with computers, so maybe I’d better explain.
Earlier this year I discovered what electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) were, and all the national echo-mail conferences. Echo-mail is where your local bbs system operator picks up messages from everybody on a national network overnight and distributes messages from his board to the network. This means that it’s possible to have a nationwide (and sometimes international) conversation on the topic of the echo, and that’s about what happens.
So what does this have to do with food? One of the national echoes on Fidonet (the network I frequent) is devoted to cooking and food, and I’ve been reading the recipes and discussion coming across there, and posting back up. It’s a lively conference, as most of the regulars are pretty Chatty Cathys. A normal day’s mail can run from fifty to a hundred messages, covering topics from how to scramble fluffy eggs to morning sickness to identification of such esoteric food items as “cooter.” (In case you wonder, it’s a dialect word for turtle, which comes from West African roots.)
We swap general cooking information. Inquiry for what to do about a cutting board that’s starting to crack? Rub it with mineral oil, a bunch of people said. How do you keep a good sourdough going? Tons of opinions, and offers of new starters for those who have loused up theirs from those who have good starters going. What cookware to buy? BOY does everybody have an opinion!
And we swap recipes. Comebody will ask for a recipe suitable to cook in a crock pot, and a half dozen people will come up with answers over the next several days. Any recipes for Cajun food? A guy in Calgary produces a steady stream of thoroughly authentic stuff. I’ve seen recipes asked for and quickly produced for jalapeño jelly (the question came from North Carolina, the answer from New Mexico) and clam cakes (question from Pittsburgh, answer from somewhere unidentified in the ether). It may take a few days for the answer(s) to percolate back to you, because a message may take two or three days getting to all the places it goes, and the answers will take as long getting back, but it’s better than writing to Ellie Rucker, because you definitely get answers from somebody, or several somebodies; and it takes about as long as the Post Office but is better because unlike snail mail (net slang for the Post Office) you can write to many many people at the same time.
Besides, we’re really a pretty nice bunch of guys to write to; we’re oil drilling engineers and retired clerical workers, food editors and graduate students, grandmothers and military, programmers and disabled, with this in common: we like food and we like cooking, and we like talking about both. It’s also surprising how often we’ll jump in and fight for another member of the echo if we think someone got out of line or personal. We like one another that much.
Of course, being mild to rabid computer nuts, all of us, we can’t just use our PCs to talk; we have to involve recipes, and thence comes the second part of this column: recipe database software. Let’s see a show of hands: how many of you cook at least semi-seriously? Uh-huh, I thought so. Of those folks, how many have computers at home? OK, not bad. Now, how many have a recipe box full of dog-eared index cards, torn-out scraps of newspaper and scribbled-on-the-back-of-something notes, and a bunch of grease-, water- and what-have-you stained cookbooks? Yep? Then you, folks, are prime candidates for recipe databases to organize and clean up that rat’s nest you call a recipe box. Lord knows I did.
My software is called Meal-Master, and it does nearly anything I want to do to a recipe. It keeps up with the ingredients and directions, sorts recipes by a slew of categories (I can make up my own, even), will expand or contract a recipe based on how many it was supposed to serve to begin with and how many I want to serve now, and even creates shopping lists on requested for a designated recipe or meal’s worth (or week’s meals’ worth) of recipes. I can quickly print out a copy to paper and not have to worry whether I get grease stains on it. If I do, pitch it and print another next time.
The other neat part is that Meal-Master is shareware. That means you get to try it out before you pay for it. You don’t like it, you erase the disk and forget it. You think it’s neat, send the author your registration fee (and it’s tons cheaper than buying software at the computer store).
There are two drawbacks at the moment. Meal-Master is written for IBM and clones, and I don’t know what’s out there for Apple II or Mac users. I know there are some programs for Commie 64 and 128 and Amiga users, but I can’t call any names to mind right now. Also, you have to type in the recipes in the first place, which is a true bore, but then it’s only got to be done once.
Just to show what this thing can do, I dug out a recipe this month with sentimental (sedimental? huh?) associations for Austin. Some of you may have been frequenters of Omelettry West back before they got to be the Magnolia Cafe or whatever. If so, you probably remember their gingerbread pancakes with great fondness. Well, a while back one of the Austin members of the cooking echo posted the recipe for the gingerbread pancakes, and I saved it as it went past, and imported it into Meal-Master. Then today I went back, exported it to a file, and pulled it into my column. What you see is exactly what I got from the PC, with no dressing up.
------------- Recipe Extracted from Meal-Master (tm) Database -------------
Title: OMELETTRY WEST’S GINGERBREAD PANCAKES
Categories: Breads, Breakfast
Servings: 4
| 3 ea Eggs | 1 t Baking powder |
| 1/4 c Sugar, brown | 1 1/2 t Baking soda |
| 1/2 c Buttermilk | 1 t Cloves, ground |
| 1/2 c Water or milk | 1 T Cinnamon |
| 1/4 c Coffee; brewed | 1 T Ginger |
| 2 1/2 c Flour, unbleached | 1 T Nutmeg |
| 1/2 t Salt | 4 T Butter; melted |
Cream together the eggs and the brown sugar, then add the buttermilk,
water and coffee. In a separate container sift together the flour,
salt,baking powder, baking soda, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg.
Then combine the liquid and dry ingredients, adding the melted butter.
Cook on a griddle as you would any other pancake. This recipe may
require a fair amount of liquid adjustment. Make sure the batter
flows off of the spoon fairly evenly, or the pancakes will be too
heavy, and will never cook all the way through without burning the
edges! Serve with butter, maple syrup, honey, or molasses.
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Aside: nice thing about the cooking echo is some folks use Meal-Master to generate their recipes to post, so you can grab them and import verbatim, no typing, no messy fingers to clean unless you don’t lick yours. Not to mention that our national echo moderator takes lots of recipes, packages them together by subject into importable files, and makes them available on File Request if you ask your local system operator nicely. I’m not gonna try to explain FREQs here. Too hard.)
If you have an IBM/clone and would like to try out Meal-Master, give me a blank floppy disk and I’ll make you a copy. I think the guy who wrote it deserves money and lots of other nice things.
first ran: January 1990
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Text ©1989 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.