Keeping your recipes ... forever

On Oct 11, 2007, at 2:14 PM, awd wrote:

> In Andy Affleck's article, "Cook from Your Mac: 10 Recipe Tools
> Compared," he laments his lost recipes in the defunct program
> Mangia. I then look at our cookbook collection and notice that we
> have a 50 year old edition of "Joy of Cooking". It is stuffed with
> a huge quantity of cards and recipes. Hence, I worry about putting
> important family recipes on transient computer systems. While Andy
> covered the ability of each program to import data from text or the
> web, he was silent on how to export my data. This is important to
> me. I have easily outlived many Mac software companies.
>
> So, the feature I most need to know about any recipe program is how
> to get my data out. Otherwise, text files and SpotLight do a
> passable job.

And I have "The Boston Cook Book", copyright 1904 Little, Brown
(after copyrights 1883 and 1900 by Mrs Lincoln). This book (the
Little, Brown edition) was 50 when I was a kid. ;-)

Also "The Boston Cooking School Cookbook" Fannie Merritt Farmer (also
Little, Brown), whose printing and edition history fills a
frontmatter page (I have the 1930 edition). Original edition
published 1898.

And yes, although I claim not to cook, I've worked out of both
books. Just not often or well. I got pretty good at the chocolate
fudge at the bottom of page 714 (still remember page number) of the
Boston Cooking School book before high school. Learn the important
stuff first!

   --John

> In Andy Affleck's article, "Cook from Your Mac: 10 Recipe Tools
> Compared," he laments his lost recipes in the defunct program
> Mangia. I then look at our cookbook collection and notice that we
> have a 50 year old edition of "Joy of Cooking". It is stuffed with
> a huge quantity of cards and recipes. Hence, I worry about putting
> important family recipes on transient computer systems. While Andy
> covered the ability of each program to import data from text or the
> web, he was silent on how to export my data. This is important to
> me. I have easily outlived many Mac software companies.
>
> So, the feature I most need to know about any recipe program is how
> to get my data out. Otherwise, text files and SpotLight do a
> passable job.

Well, many of them print quite nicely and I do talk about that. Many
of them can export to a number of different formats and a few of them
are quite adept at importing from other programs. But, I agree,
there's nothing better for long term storage than what you have now.
While I am slowly (very very slowly) getting my recipes online. I
would never get rid of the original sources any more than I would get
rid of all my CDs (in boxes in the basement) now that they've been
ripped to iTunes. There's no better backup than the original sources.

-A

The Recipe Box stores all of its data in text files in XML format, so it should be fairly durable. You can open a recipe book with any application that can open a text file and the contents are actually readable by ordinary humans. :-)

In the interest of full disclosure, Sonora Graphics is my company.

Mike, Sonora Graphics <http://sonoragraphics.com/software.html>