If you like to experiment with recipes and are relatively computer-savvy, MasterCook Deluxe and MasterCook Cooking Light are the digital cookbooks for you.
Be warned. It will take some reading of the manual and thinking about what you are doing to get the programs to do what you want, but it is well worth the effort.
The two CD-ROMs, both from Sierra On-line, Inc., use the same mechanism. Once they are loaded on your hard drive, you can search both at once for the kind of food you want to use, how many calories each serving should be and the grams of fat or milligrams of sodium it should contain.
In fact, the two discs contain 2,250 recipes divided between individual books that are linked for easy reference. Besides the title books, the MasterCook Deluxe CD-ROM includes Bar Guide, Family Favorites, Famous American Chefs and Kitchen Classics.
When you open MasterCook Deluxe, you will get a list of the digital cookbooks. Click on the one you want and you will get a table of contents. For example, click on a recipe for lasagne. The recipe appears, as well as a summary of how many grams of fat, the percent of calories from fat and the grams of protein, carbohydrates, cholesterol and sodium in the recipe.
Now the fun begins. This lasagne, despite using skim milk cheeses, still packs 757 calories per serving and gets 45.8 percent of its calories from fat, according to the comprehensive nutritional analysis that you can obtain by clicking on the food groups icon on the tool bar. The nutritional analysis uses a data base of 5,500 foods.
What would happen if you made it vegetarian? Click on edit and you get a box where you can change each of the ingredients. Substitute mushrooms, onions and green pepppers for beef and sausage and do another nutritional analysis. The calories are cut to 569 per serving and the new recipe gets only 31.9 pecent of the calories from fat.
The substitution of vegetables for meat gives you twice as much fiber and half the cholesterol, and more vitamin B2 and C, but you do lose some protein and vitamin B-12.
One piece of the vegetarian lasagne eats up only 32 percent of your daily allotment of saturated fat for a 2,000 calorie diet, rather than 82 percent with the meat lasagne.
Be careful, however. The nutritional analysis tries to take into account how the food will be prepared, but it isn’t perfect. It may count all the calories in the wine used to prepare a food, or all the oil used to fry, rather than just the amount that enters the food.
You can also call up the form for a new recipe and see how one of your own dishes stacks up. My mother’s brownies, for example, which use cocoa, have 162 calories per brownie, making them lighter than the Family Favorites Cookbook’s “Fudgiest Brownies,” which have 251.
Using the Bar Guide, you not only can learn how to prepare dozens of hard and soft mixed drinks, but determine that Long Island Iced Tea, with its killer combination of vodka, gin, rum, tequila, triple sec, lemon juice and cola, has 249 calories.
All of the recipes can be recalculated for the number of people you want to serve by clicking on the three spoons on the tool bar. Each can be printed in a number of styles–letter style with a choice of three borders, half pages for putting together brochures or newsletters, or index cards.
Using the shopping list feature, either MasterCook program will list all necessary ingredients and their amounts, sorted alphabetically by ingredient or category (for easier shopping), and print the list with boxes to check once they are in your shopping cart.
Under tools, you can call up hundreds of utensils, such as cherry stoners, corn cutters or couscous pans, and get pictures. Click on the calendar in the tools bar and you can list meals with or without recipes for a month.
MasterCook Deluxe at $39.95 and Cooking Light at $34.95 each require a CD-ROM drive, Windows 3.1 or MS-DOS 5.0 for a PC, or Macintosh 6.0 and 3 MB of RAM. Rating: (star) (star) (star) (star) (out of four stars)
– The best features of Elle Cooking are the high quality videos and the international flavor of the recipes. The worst feature is the annoying music.
Like most digital cookbooks, Elle allows you to search for recipes with the ingredients you want to use, to print recipes and look up unfamilar terms in a glossary. You also can click on a highlighted word in a recipe and get an instant description.
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Elle Cooking has a suggested retail price of $29.95. It requires a double speed CD-ROM drive and 8 MB of RAM and either Windows 3.1 or higher for a PC and 8 MB of RAM and system 7.0 for a Macintosh. Rating: (star) (star)
