Recipe - a recipe database manager

If you are in cooking, recipes is all you need. You can get them from books, from friends, from cooking courses and even in restaurants. But what will you do with such a recipe, maybe hastily written on a sheet of paper?

Well, you put it in some box and probably never see it again. Okay, there are people, who govern chaos, but, there is a second problem. What, if you try the recipe and change it to your needs? This process can be iterating several times, when the original paper is not readable to anyone but you. Now you have two choices. Copy the latest version to a new piece of paper or stay with what you have. We prefered the former, although, it makes you think of some better way to archive your recipes. Since, we have computers, nowadays, why not use them to index and archive those recipes. This would solve another tough problem. The problem of passing on recipes. After some years of struggling with the old system, it became more and more clear to us, that we need an electronic recipe book.

There are many software packages available that manage a database of recipes. Some are very clever pieces of software, indeed, but we didn´t need a super-mega-recipe-program. What we needed, was a simple program, that fits our standards, which are:

including sources to change, if necessary,
textual representation of data (to have full control and can use those fine unix tools),
output to HTML and TeX of multiple recipes (easier distribution) and
a full unix-style filter (ease of use).

We planned such a program, its database format and anything else, but had no time to implement it. So the specification dwelled on our machine until suddenly, after months of waiting we finally did it! We now proudly present:

recipe

We put recipe under the GPL, so anyone can have it. Oh, I forgot to tell. You have to have some really cute OS, say Linux, to use recipe, without translating it to some other platform. It will compile under GCC/G++ 2.95 (or newer) with libstdc++2.10 (or higher).

Download the latest tarball: recipe-1.1.93.tar.gz
Some recipes can be found here