Despite the stereotype that net nerds subsist on Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, the Internet has what must be the world's largest recipe collection. From the earliest days of Usenet, people swapped mama's secret meatloaf recipes along with the more serious stuff. Newsgroups are still the place to go if you're on a quest for velvet cake or something to do with the bushel of peaches you bought at the farmer's market in Fredricksburg. Rec.food.recipes lists hundreds every day. This is one group where you want to be sure to read the frequently asked questions (FAQ.) All that this newsgroup contains is recipes; no idle chit-chat. If you are looking for a recipe, there is a procedure for getting your request to the moderator, who collates a daily most wanted list. If you want to gab about recipes, subscribe to rec. food. cooking instead. I also subscribe to alt.food.preserving, where I learned 20 different methods for sun drying tomatoes and picked up some good salsa recipes for the excess bounty from the tomato patch. There are dozens of food groups; using your mail reader to search all the newsgroups for the text string food should unearth most of them for you.
Many of the recipes available on the Internet are formatted for Meal-Master, a DOS shareware program that catalogs recipes. If you don't have a copy of Meal-Master you can pick one up for ftp://oak.oakland.edu/SimTel/msdos/food or on the World Wide Web at http://www.primenet.com/~wilson/mm/software.html. This site also carries several Meal-Master utilities, such as one to convert previously-typed recipes to the Meal-Master format. Meal-Master recipes can eat up a huge hard drive quickly, especially if you get greedy and start downloading files such as 821 recipes with chocolate in them or 2,130 things to try with lemons besides making lemonade (723 kilobytes, zipped!). These archives, and more, are available at http://www.primenet.com/~wilson/recipes.html.
People in Pittsburgh must eat well; three of my favorite recipe sites are at Carnegie-Mellon University. The Dinner Co-op Recipe Collection, at http://gs216.sp.cs.cmu.edu/dinnercoop/home-page.htm is a seven page list of sites, sorted by ethnic category and type of food. It's built for speed, not looks, but it's the most efficient way I've found to look for recipes for medieval or Brazilian food or to find 100 things to do with fava beans. The Recipe Archive Index carries recipes in 25 categories. I immediately turned to Cookies and Bars, where there were hundreds of new recipes for me to try, including dozens for biscotti, which I think will be this year's cookie innovation. The Recipe Archive Index is at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/. The Carnagie-Mellon English Server also has a recipe folder divided into the categories vegetarian stuff, dead animals and things possibly involving dead animals and possibly not. This site contains links to many gophers, including Tex-Mex recipes from the University of Minnesota (and I thought all they ate in Minnesota was lutefish!) The Recipes Folder is at http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/recipes.html.
There a lot more vegetarian sites on the Internet and Alamo PC member Richard Weers has cataloged many of them on his home page, http://www.texas.net/users/weersrg. One of the most comprehensive is run by the Vegetarian Resource Group, at http://envirolink.org/arrs/VRG/home.html. In addition to carrying tons of recipes, their archived journals list super stuff. My husband likes carrots better than cookies (poor, misguided soul) so I downloaded pages and pages of carrot dishes to cook for him. Veggies Unite! has a great interface. You can search the recipes alphabetically or by category, and then add them to your shopping list and your weekly meal planner. Both documents are maintained on the server for 12 hours, and you can, of course, print them. I got obsessed on this site and ended up planning an entire week of vegetarian menus. Reach it at http://www.honors.indiana.edu/~veggie/recipes.cgi/. Finally, don't forget the Whole Foods Market Home Page, at http://www.wholefoods.com/. We live around the corner from the San Antonio store and I was delighted to see that they carry many of the recipes for foods we get from their takeout section, including curried spinach samosas. Yum.
Martha Johnson and Anne Potter, Alamo PC members who work with my husband at Fort Sam Houston, pointed me to Epicurious, the home page of Conde Nast magazines Bon Appetit and Gourmet. This is one of the most beautifully designed web pages I have visited, and you can reach it at http://www.epicurious.com/epicurious/. Even with my 28.8 bps modem, I had time to whip up a couple of batches of chocolate chip cookies while this site was downloading, so if you are surfing at a lower modem speed you might want to tack /home-alt.html to the end of the URL to get the text-only version. The recipes here are lush: some of the ingredients cost more than my car. One can dream, though. I enjoyed Fresh Forums, their own newsgroup, where you can exchange recipes with other readers. What's Ripe? features farmer's markets across the country (none near here, alas) and let's you know what's in season . If the cranberries have just come in from New Jersey, the site will flip you over to cranberry recipes.
Two other gourmet web-zines deserve mention. The Electronic Gourmet Guide, also known as eGG, is at http://www.2way.com/food/egg/index.html. It has recipes and also dishes up a random food site of the week, a good way to introduce yourself to new cuisines. I got a kick out of columnist Merrill Shindler's Guide to eating pretty good, in the Foodplex at http://www.gigaplex.com/wow/food/index.htm. He writes short pieces on topics such as, Which pepper sauce will burn your brains out, and Ever wonder what dog biscuits taste like? He's well worth the read.
Some of the best food sites are run by food companies. I have a soft spot for Hershey. In between my wanderjahr in Europe and joining the army, I spent time decompressing as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Hershey was our biggest client. Abandoning all of the chocolate for a pouch of MREs wasn't easy! Visit Hershey -- the town, the school, the park and the hotel, as well as the recipes -- at http://www.hersheys.com. While the Hershey recipes are as wholesome as their fudgey peanutbutter chip muffins; Godiva's are decadent . You can find the archives from their Choclatier magazine at http://www.godiva.com. If you whip up any of these, call me.
Despite Forest Gump's assertion, the web isn't just a box of chocolates. The grandmother of all the commercial food pages is Mama's Cucina, hosted by Ragu. In addition to the recipes, Mama teaches you how to speak Italian, takes you on a tour of Little Italy in New York City and even throws in some cents-off coupons. This site has been held up as a model of what a great commercial web page should offer, and you can visit it at http://www.eat.com.
The Chile-Heads home page is all you ever wanted to know
about San Antonio's hottest condiment, from growing peppers to eating them.
These bubbas throw chiles in everything, from mango-habenero ice cream
to pfeffernusse mit scotch bonnet peppers. Their Chile Gallery offers pictures
of more than 50 different varieties. Visit the Chile heads at http://www.netimages.com/~chile/.
A whacky site that should also appeal to Texans is Cooking with Armadillo.
In real life, Armadillo is a brand of laser printer; on the web, it's fun.
This page offers three armadillo recipes: mu-shu armadillo, armadillo chili
and smoked armadillo chops. If you're not partial to chowing down on roadkill,
pork can be substituted. Their site is at http://www.ais.net/armadillo/cooking.html.
Campers might want to check out the recipes in the rec.scouting archive
at ftp://ethz.ch/rec.scouting/recipes.
Great stuff here, including dandelion cuisine.