Answers to common questions about alt.gourmand (Updated 18 Nov 87)
Brian Reid
* What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've
tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works.
The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package
and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and
shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are
distributed as part of the "software package" in the
automatic quarterly posting; you can also retrieve the software
from the archive system (see below).
* I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly
broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index?
The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words
interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help!
The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it.
The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the
Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated
using the same program that generates the index to the Unix
manuals.
This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is
also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key
Word In Context."
Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the
title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be
indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title",
"indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate
index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper
alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed.
Because titles can be very long but paper has only a
certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes
must make some decisions about how much of the title to
show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is
the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen
words of the title in each index line. The word being
indexed falls in the center.
* Some of the recipes call for ingredients that I have never heard of. For
example, can you tell me what a "Graham Cracker" is?
There are certain ingredients that are considered to be staples
in some countries but are utterly unavailable in others. For example,
in Australia every cook has a substance called "copha", which is
absolutely unavailable in North America and extremely rare in Europe.
In England there is a substance called "golden syrup" which is
very difficult to find in North America. The American "Crisco"
solid vegetable fat is quite unknown in other continents. Whenever
there is a reasonable substitute that I know about, I will have edited
the "Notes" section of the recipe to suggest substitute ingredients.
But there are a few ingredients, notably copha and golden syrup,
for which I nave never been able to find a credible substitute.
* I live in Europe, and use metric measurements for my cooking. I am
accustomed to measuring volumes in centiliters and deciliters, and weight
in grams. I use teaspoons and tablespoons for small volumes. Why do you
use milliliters for small volumes? It is a big nuisance to convert those
milliliter quantities to grams in order to weigh them. Why not just
use spoons?
The problem is that there is no particular agreement on the size of
teaspoons and tablespoons in different countries. In North America
the sizes are fixed at 5ml for a teaspoon and 15ml for a tablespoon,
but in other countries a teaspoon can vary from 3ml to 10ml and a
tablespoon can vary from 10ml to 30ml.
To use the milliliter measurements, you must first learn how many
ml are in your spoons, and then translate from ml to your spoon
volumes. The most common European measuring spoon sets are 1ml, 2.5ml,
5ml, 10ml, and 15ml, and the recipe quantities are adjusted for these
sizes. If you live in a country (e.g. Holland) where a large spoon is
20ml, you should try to buy a French or German or Swiss set, or learn
to live with the difference.
* I submitted a recipe a couple of months ago, and I notice that you haven't
published it yet, though you have published several newer recipes. What
are you waiting for?
I don't do first-in, first-out publication. I give high priority to
recipes from most of Europe, medium priority to recipes from England
and Australia, ordinary priority to recipes from North America, and
low priority to recipes that have appeared recently elsewhere on the
net. Sometimes I rearrange the sequence to cluster similar recipes
together. Sometimes a particularly strange recipe will sit for weeks
while I work up the gastronomic courage to test it. My goal is to
achieve maximum diversity. If you send in another cheesecake or chili
recipe, and you live in New Jersey, the recipe will sit in the queue
for a long time. But if you live in Belgium or Italy or Norway or
Iceland, or if you send in a well-written recipe for a complex and
unusual pastry that your grandmother taught you to make, I wwill send
it out almost instantly.
* Do you really test all of these recipes? If so, you must have an iron
stomach.
No, I don't. Most of them are simple enough that I can just look them
up in my library and find published recipes that are similar, and
compare. Some I ask friends to try. Some I test myself. In general I
only test the exotic, complicated, or unusual recipes.
* Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a
nuisance.
The cookbook does not have page numbers because there
are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers
would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the
keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep
your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword
name. These names will not change from one week to the
next, unlike page numbers.
Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the
cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix
manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is
printed using the Unix manual software.
* I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like
to get a complete collection.
There are two "official" sources of back issues, and probably many
unofficial sources. All of the recipes ever posted, both to
alt.gourmand and its predecessor mod.recipes, are available
via ARPAnet anonymous FTP from gatekeeper.dec.com, in directory "recipes".
Consult your local ARPAnet expert for instructions on how to do this.
There is also an "archive server" accessible by mail. This is a program
that receives mail and processes commands in it, and mails you back
the results. For example, if you send the server a message saying
"send recipe aardvark-stew"
then it will mail you back a copy ofhe aardvark-stew recipe.
Full instructions for using the archive server are in a companion
posting to this message. If you can't find it, send the server a
message containing the one word "help", and it will mail you back
the instructions by return mail. The server's address is
archive...@decwrl.dec.com
or {ucbvax,decvax,hplabs,sun,pyramid}!decwrl!archive-server
* Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like
Troff. Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available?
TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only
format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might
think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there
who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like.
USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some
form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the
network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often
they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions
of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest
possible audience.