Do you have a computer with a CD-ROM drive? Do you have a box in your kitchen stuffed with handwritten illegible recipes and newspaper clippings you can never find when you want one? Do you own more than one cookbook that you actually use? Do you enjoy reading cookbooks and learning new techniques as much as you like finding new recipes?
Digital cookbooks will never replace the hard stuff in a kitchen run by a cook who loves cookbooks. Flipping through the pages of a favorite or thinking about the person who gave it to you is as much a part of the cookbook experience as finding what you want when you want it.
OK, unlike its paper counterpart a CD doesn’t fray or fall apart after years of use, but there’s a history in that Marian Burros book that opens at just the right page every time you pull it out. And, unless you have a computer in the kitchen or buy a CD-ROM with a companion cookbook, you’ll need a printer to actually use your digital recipes.
Like their paper counterparts, CD-ROM cookbooks fall into several categories: ones that are fun to read but not that useful; good tutorials accompanied by exotic recipes; and, that rare find, a must-have you’ll turn to again and again.
Then there are two areas where a computer-based cookbook has the edge: organizing your own kitchen and managing nutritional needs.
Sierra On-Line’s MasterCook series has no true competition if you are looking for a program for food and recipe management.
“Cooking Light,” “Graham Kerr’s Swiftly Seasoned,” “The Jenny Craig Cookbook” and “MasterCook Deluxe 4.0.” Deluxe is the way to go if your dietary needs are less specific and you’re looking lots of recipes (more than 2,000) and more generic help.
You can rely on MasterCook’s recipes or plug in your own. Autofill makes typing a tad less tedious, spell-checking keeps the mistakes down and a nifty e-mail feature lets you share Mom’s brisket recipe with everyone on the family e-mail list. MasterCook is the only one with more than a cursory commercial on-line presence and a seemingly endless availability of free new recipes in the right format.
If you’re collecting recipes to publish a small cookbook, check out MasterCook’s sibling, “Mangia,” with its fairly wide variety of printing styles. It comes with portion scaling, the ability to make a pantry list and the ability to produce its own demos that can be freely distributed and used for two months.
Broderbund’s entry in the cooking lists more than lives up to the culinary reputation of its namesake: “The Williams-Sonoma Guide to Good Cooking.”
Like MasterCook, this one has the right stuff to become a staple in your cyberkitchen. It’s elegant yet immensely usable. Its 1,000 recipes can be searched by region, season, method, time and ingredients.
One drawback: most of the cooking CD-ROMs work in older PCs or Macs, but “Williams-Sonoma” is for Windows 95 PCs and PowerMacs only.
Multicom Publishing Inc. lives up to its name by having the most cooking titles 10–under the “Better Homes and Garden” name alone. Multicom has worked hard to offer something for everyone ranging from “The Woman’s Day Cookbook,” a definite plus for the practical cook with a family to feed on a regular basis, to the “Gourmet Cooking Suite” for the, well, gourmet cook with a taste for adventure and the ability to make it past recipes like “Fresh Cracked Conch with Vanilla Rum Sauce” without gagging.
“Woman’s Day” is the best all-around program with equivalents, conversions, emergency substitutions, real-life recipes and seasonal weekly menu suggestions.
The Gourmet Cooking Suite includes “The Best of Food & Wine” from the magazine of the same name, “Great Chefs, Great Cities” based on the TV show; and the “Gold Edition of Wines of the World.”
These titles can also be bought individually with or without companion books, but the three-CD suite is by far the best value. Together the two cookbooks are fun and useful while the wine disc will keep any oenophile-wannabe busy.
