What is alt.gourmand? (last updated 23 Sept 1987)
Brian Reid
electronic mail and as part of the Alternative USENET. It carries material
that can be used to assemble a cookbook (or "cookery book", if you live
outside North America) called "The Electronic Gourmand".
Alt.gourmand is an expansion and continuation of the old USENET newsgroup
named "mod.recipes". USENET became too much of a hidebound bureaucracy for my
tastes, so I moved the operation over to the Alternative Network in the
newly-formed alt.* groups.
People read through the articles, save the ones they like and ignore the
ones that they don't like, and then periodically print out a personalized
copy of "The Electronic Gourmand".
Everything posted to alt.gourmand is put there by the newsgroup editor,
namely me. I am Brian Reid of DEC Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto,
California. As editor, I don't necessarily write everything for it, but I
must approve everything that goes out, and I edit the contributions for
spelling, grammar, and stylistic consistency. Sometimes I add some historical
information, or some commentary on the articles.
The alt.gourmand system is almost completely automated. People submit
material for publication by mailing it to a certain mailbox. I proofread each
item and check the dubious-looking ones to make sure that they are
reasonable. To each item that is a recipe, I add a "rating" according to how
easy or hard it is to make, and how long it will take. If the recipe was
submitted in imperial units (cups and teaspoons), I add metric equivalents
(grams and milliliters); if the recipe was submitted in metric units, then I
add the imperial equivalents.
I also add a copyright notice, copyrighting each recipe for the "USENET
Community Trust", which is a California organization formed for the purpose
of holding that copyright. When a recipe has been edited, formatted,
converted to metric, proofread, and marked with copyright, then it is placed
in the outgoing queue. Each week, on Thursday night, recipes are posted
from the queue. There is about a 6-week backlog.
Everything intended for the book is posted both as cleartext and in troff
form, though the cleartext versions do not go outside North America. To
process articles with troff (or nroff) you will need special macros; there is
also some "recipe software" that makes handling the recipes easier and more
automatic. This is all available from the decwrl archive server, which is
described in message "2 of 5" of this posting.
Brian Reid
{ucbvax,sun,decvax}!decwrl!reid or re...@decwrl.dec.com
DEC Western Research Laboratory