John O’Mahony gets a taste for browsing for food on the Net
Back when the CD-ROM was being heralded as the saviour of the digital universe, someone presented me with a copy of United States television chef Julia Child’s multimedia cookbook, Home Cooking with Master Chefs.
By any standard, this was a spectacular piece of culinary engineering, with video tutorials from such notable chefs as Patrick Clark and Jacques Pepin, touting tips on attaining the perfect lobster thermidor or chocolate souffle as well as, in one case, a handy S&M approach to trussing a chicken that might have troubled Houdini.
This was complemented by Child’s curiously inspiring grandmotherly warble. “The art of cooking is indeed a noble hobby,” she gurgled every time the disc slipped into the player.
Now that the information CD-ROM has largely been consigned to the dustbin of history, it is the duty of the Web to take over where Child left off.
For the average, budding Net-epicure, the ideal place to start would be Soar: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes, which boasts a staggering 67E087 different dishes from which to choose.
Though the site is nothing much to look at, and the basic courier font recipes look as if they have been hand-typed on a faulty Smith-Corona, there is a mind-boggling range including Australian, Burmese, Chinese, Tibetan, Czech, Venezuelan and Inuit.
The descriptions of the ingredients and preparation, all supplied by users of this “recipe ring”, are lovingly detailed. “I’m in the process of making it even as I type,” gushes the creator of Doro Wat, an Ethiopian stew, “and it’s real good so far.”
There is even a section on Extraterrestrial and Bizarre Menus that manages to be vaguely humorous.
“Cut elephant into bite-size pieces,” says the recipe for elephant stew. “Cook over kerosene fire at 450 degrees for about four weeks, or until golden brown. Serves 3E800.”
Soar’s more upmarket cousin is www.allrecipes.com, a tasteful, slick and well-designed site with some wonderful bells and whistles such as a “my recipe box”, where users can store their favourites as well as a “recipe exchange” notice board where you can post requests for particular menus.
The recipes themselves are an infinity away from Soar’s crude list format, with a button for switching between imperial and metric measurements and a facility for printing A4 pages or on kitchen-friendly cue cards.
The site also caters for those needing special diets. It includes 227 recipes for vegetarians (highlights include smoky eggplant and yoghurt salad and cornucopia chilli), 137 for vegans (who can really pig out on bramblewood blackberry pie and bittersweet banana pudding), as well as sections for gluten-free, sugar-free and even diabetic dietary requirements.
There is also a whole set of linked subsites catering for special occasions and needs: www.christmasrecipe.com, www.thanksgivingrecipe.com, www. souprecipe.com and many more.
Of the other culinary megasites, the most notable is the superbly designed www.e- cuisines.com which includes an extremely accurate facility to calculate the calories in any meal. TV and radio cook Betty Crocker offers a revolutionary “what’s on hand” section: punch in the meagre ingredients of your cupboard and the site will match these to a suitable dish (one egg and a pint of milk produced an astonishing 24 choices) as well as RealAudio streaming editions of Crocker’s radio programme.
The Cook’s Thesaurus at www. switcheroo.com is an ingenious idea that allows you to find viable substitutes for missing ingredients.
Lovers of Asian food should try a natty little new-age site called www. asiarecipe.com (currently under reconstruction) which proclaims “Think Peace” from every page and offers choices from regions as diverse as Laos, Mongolia and Turkmenistan.
Just plain lovers can plump for the Santesson collection of Aphrodisiac dishes at www.santesson.com/ recept/aphrlist.ht with offerings such as fennel soup, “amorous” pesto and the inevitable candied violets.
Finally, those who like cooking without effort can go for the cheap and cheerful www.everydaycook.com which includes a glossary for the total beginner. “To boil,” runs one definition, “heating liquid, which causes a constant production of bubbles that rise and break the surface.”
But despite the diversity on offer, I’m still not quite sure that these glorified online cookbooks match up to the multimedia possibilities of Julia and her good old CD- ROM. Bandwidth limitations simply don’t allow for online tutorials and vital illustrated tips that can really transform a meal.
While waiting for this to be remedied, you could do worse than pick up one of the last copies of Home Cooking with Master Chefs from www. cdromshop.com. Head straight for the horseradish-crusted grouper with mashed potatoes. Your dinner parties may never be quite the same again.