Stick a fork in it, it’s done

After thirteen years, it’s done.  All of my online recipes—all 13,468 of them—are in one database and one format.

During my days on Fidonet and Usenet, I was one of the active (some might say demon) participants in cooking newsgroups.  Even today a quick Google of my name brings up more references to recipes that I posted or re-posted than to anything else.  At one point I was so active and posting so much in the rec.food.recipes newsgroup on Usenet, a moderated group devoted only to requests and replies for recipes, that I was assigned a personal moderator, and in Usenet terms, if you rate a personal moderator because of your posting volume, you’re something.  (I can even remember my moderator and his address after all this time:  Mark Alexander, mark@alexr.co.uk.)

In short, I was a recipe collecting fool, although I did build on the work of a recipe vacuum named Harold Gunderson, who indiscriminately captured every recipe posted in the Fidonet cooking groups for several years.  The problem was that Harold never checked to see whether he already had a recipe before he captured it, and he used a database application that allowed free-form text and wasn’t searchable worth beans, especially when he forgot to add any keywords to a recipe, as he often did.  And as for his idea of formatting . . . well, he didn’t have one.  What he gave me was one huge muddle.

So when I got Harold’s QuikBook files with twelve thousand-some recipes in them, I had to start sorting through and trying to figure out what he had that I had also, and to reformat the remainder into the strict format that my recipe database, Meal-Master, used for its imports.  It was a huge project, and I worked at it on and off for years.  I’d get enthusiastic and do three or four hundred at a time, then grow tired and not do anything more about it for months.  Along the way I acquired a couple of reformatters that would do a lot of the grunt work of translating free-form QuikBook recipes to something that MM could handle, but sometimes (a lot of the time, really) I found it was just as fast to edit the recipes by hand.

But like many huge projects, this one had its ending.  (There are projects that never end, but that’s another story and another day.  Sometime I’ll have to tell the story about my mother and “God.”)  A few minutes ago I imported the last sixty reformatted QuikBook recipes into Meal-Master.  All that is left are a few whose size or strange format make them very hard to import into MM, and they’ll need a bunch of extra work if they’re to fit at all.

Jeez.  Thirteen years and thirteen thousand non-duplicated recipes—besides the bookcase I have that’s crammed with my cookbook collection.  That should be enough to do anyone for any two or three lifetimes now.

Maybe I should start reading rec.food.recipes again, now that I’m done and everything’s easily findable . . . .

The blue-dog ninja contaminates the reticulated surfboard.  Fnord.