News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 18 (entry 1)

Sat Jan 18 2003 14:05: I like fancy cookbooks, with their pictures and their coherent themes, but what I really like is enormous collections of recipes in electronic form, thrown together by user-contribution serendipity and given form by desperate one-word categorizations[0]. In my BBS days I would scour BBSes for packages of Meal Master-readable recipes and hoard them on my BBS, possibly only ever preparing one or two recipes found in the whole corpus. Nowadays I cook a lot more, so I have more than an academic interest in lists of recipes. Here are a few sites, including a couple I found just now while researching this entry.

• Recipe Circus, a chaotic Geocities for personal recipe lists. Goes first on the list because it's run by JB Hiller, my old co-worker from MAP.
• RecipeSource, which takes the prize for sheer number of recipes. This is what I use most often. Sumana is on her way over to my house right now and we're going to make pasta with tomato-avocado sauce. It also includes silly recipes for extinct arthropods like Ammonite Chowder and Trilobite Creole.
• Michael Witbrock's Recipe Archive Index is very old-school and includes recipes from the uncanny valley of food, like sourdough chocolate cake.
• I don't really trust the fancy interface to Epicurious' recipe index, {but, and} the recipes therein are taken from fancy cooking magazines, so the recipes are more highbrow; not many recipes there in which pudding is an ingredient. However, there are good-looking recipes for fancy puddings, like pumpkin bread pudding and Lemon Surprise Pudding ("[T]he surprise being that it's chocolate").

[0] Also, I really like the self-published cookbooks that you see in tourist traps and restaurant gift shops while on road trips. I've never bought one, though.