The Computer Cook Book

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 5/10

Chris Bourne 5/10

Memory: 48K Price: £9.50 The Spectrum dons a white hat and apron in a new program from Bug-Byte, The Computer Cookbook. The package comprises two cassettes, the first containing a menu planner and the second details of recipes. It is difficult to see how anyone would prefer loading a lengthy program to obtain a recipe rather than opening a cookbook but Bug-Byte thinks otherwise and employed a respected freelance chef, Ian Hoare, to provide a series of recipes for dishes both traditional and exotic. The recipes are reasonably clear, if necessarily brief, given memory limitations. One useful feature is the facility to determine the correct quantities for any number of people up to 200. The menu planner is of rather more interest, permitting you to choose a meal based on the size of your purse or the ingredients in your store cupboard. When all is said and done the program remains a souped-up database. Genuine cooks would do better to buy a general-purpose filing program and use it to store their favourite recipes.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Sinclair Programs

June Mortimer

We look at the best and the worst releases in a month which offers new games from top software houses Fantasy and Ultimate. COMPUTER COOK BOOK The Computer Cook Book by Bug Byte would merit an entry in the computer press pseuds corner if there were such a thing. To use it properly you must search your cupboards to see what ingredients you have available, carry the television set cassette recorder and computer into the kitchen, set them up, load the database program, select your chosen recipe, load the recipe program and then cook. Cook, that is, if you have room among the electrical equipment then cluttering your work surfaces. Most of it is also irrelevant if you follow any kind of special diet. Bug Byte seems to be implying that it is easier to go to all that trouble than to flick through your favourite recipe book but it is not. Produced for the 48K Spectrum by Bug-Byte Ltd, [redacted], price £9.50.

Crash

Roger Kean

Producer: Bug-Byte Memory Required: 48K Retail Price: £9.50 Author: Ian Hoare In some recipe books it tells you how long to allow for preparation time of the dish. With The Computer Book, the first of its kind, you had better allow a few extra minutes per pound as the data takes a while to load. The package comes as two cassettes, a Menu Planner tape and a Recipe tape. The recipe tape uses both sides of the cassette. On side one there are 20 Starters and 20 Main Courses, and on side two there are 20 Desserts, 20 recipes for vegetables and 5 recipes for odds and ends like mayonnaise and fish fumet. Computer cook books may well be very useful, especially so if you have one of those ultra-modern kitchens with a plumbed in Spectrum and monitor, but one thing this program lacks is the mouthwatering colour photographs of dishes designed to get your culinary skills going. Perhaps the advantage to the non-computing mum (there seem to be less and less of these around nowadays) is that because this is computer cookery, she can get the alien-zapping son to do the cooking from now on. Any recipe book must stand or fall by the recipes contained in it. The author, Ian Hoare, is a noted chef to British Routiers, and the program notes claim that the recipes are well tried and tested - indeed even favourites of Mr Hoare's customers, so they can be used with confidence. The starters section includes standards like Avocado with Crab, French Onion Soup and Scampi. It also has a few exotics like Gulyas Soup or Whiting a Verdurette. Similarly, the Main courses are well selected from Beef Bourguignon through Elizabethan Pork to Choucroute Garnie. The desserts range from Jam Pockets through Vacherie to Zuppa Inglese (trifle). Using this section is quite simple and the program is reasonably user-friendly, with one startling exception. A numbered menu (no pun) allows selection of the particular section, e.g. Starters or Main Courses; information in a box explains how to get a hard copy if you have a printer, and then a yellow box states, 'Q to quit, any other key to continue.' Pressing any other key, however, will result in varied onscreen abuse explaining that you are an idiot! Below the yellow information box is another set of text which merely says, 'To remind yourself of the title PLEASE PRESS 1, 2 or 3'. This is a roundabout way of confusing the novice computer cook. You cannot just press any other key, but only the appropriate numbered key. Anyway, selecting a section results in a neat dissolve to the 20 recipes. Any may be chosen by pressing the appropriate letter key. You are then asked to input the number of guests being fed, and here is one of the Computer Cook Book's great strengths - the recipes can be shown with the required ingredients for between one and 200 diners. (Did you know that Chocolate Mousse Basquais requires 15lb plain chocolate and 120 eggs to feed 200?). The ingredients are listed and a hard copy may be made for shopping list purposes. A key press then reveals the method of preparation and cooking with helpful hints also available at a key press. This too may be sent to hard copy. Before returning to the main list, the ingredients may be seen again. In most respects this works very well. I was only disappointed to be informed that the cooking method for Coq au Vin was the same as for Beef Bourguignon, which meant wading through the menu again. It should have been possible to repeat the instruction, surely, for the selected dish. MENU PLANNER The second tape is the cookbook's index with five sections. Section one sorts things out - dishes from a particular country, dishes by ease of cooking, dishes by price, dishes by time of preparation. You can also see a list of the recipes, all the ingredients used in the recipes and pick an ingredient, say Celery Seed, and find out what recipes it is used in. One section will suggest wines to accompany meals. This is done by first asking whether the wine is to go with starters, main courses or desserts. Choosing then leads you to the recipe list, where you can tell the computer which dish the wine is to accompany. The result is a first offer and a cheaper alternative. Some of the wines are extremely expensive. A useful section is the Store Cupboard, which allows the computer to sort through the recipes and find out if there's one which will use up whatever you may have lying around. It has some oddities, however. Since the sort is only done from a basic list of ingredients used in the program, I was surprised to see that red cabbage cropped up nowhere in any recipe - so why was red cabbage listed in the first place? Trying in desperation to find something to do with the wretched stuff, I pressed for a search through Desserts. As I expected there was no recipe, but the computer must have become confused as it printed out, "d COPY e?Cabbage - sorry, there are no recipes using d COPY E£Cabbage in this section." It was obviously a firm reminder that I should write my own dessert recipe based around red cabbage. CONCLUSION For what you get (60 main recipes) this package is reasonably priced. I wonder how many cooks will actually have a Spectrum in the kitchen, but it isn't necessary with the hard copy facility, and in this respect the program is friendly to use. It is possible to buy cheaper books with more recipes in, but I hope the Computer Cook Book does well, not because it is invaluable, but because it points the way to better things in the future.

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

IT'S ALL IN THE COOK BOOK Bug Byte, one of Liverpool's leading software houses, has produced one of the most novel and practical programs for the Spectrum to date. The Computer Cook Book contains a set of programs that help you select an appropriate meal according to the ingredients that you have at hand. The program chooses the recipes depending on the cost, difficulty of preparation, cooking time and country of origin - and will also select a wine to complement the food. Cooking for an army wouldn't prove too much of a problem - it can work out the right amounts of each ingredient for up to 200 people, in metric or imperial weights. The Computer Cook Book comes on two cassettes. The first is for one-off recipes and the second plans menus for dinner parties or large meals. Fanny Craddock could have endless fun with this! The Computer Cook Book is available from Bug Byte Software for the 48K Spectrum and costs £9.50

Personal Computer News

Features 4/5

Documentation 3/5

Performance 3/5

Reliability 4/5

Ease Of Use 4/5

Overall Value 4/5

Clare Gurton 4/5

INSTANT COOKBOOK Clare Gurton tastes the Computer Cookbook on her Spectrum and finds it dishes up a few treats. NAME: The Computer Cookbook APPLICATION: Meal Planner PRICE: £9.50 SYSTEM: Spectrum 48K FORMAT: Cassette OTHER VERSIONS: None SUPPLIER: Bug-Byte, [redacted] OUTLETS: Mail order Bug-Byte has recently launched what it claims to be the very first computer cookbook. The program was designed jointly by Bug-Byte and Ian Hoare, a freelance chef to British Routiers, and is labelled as a family program for the family computer. But I can't quite imagine the average Spectrum suddenly deciding to treat the family to Elizabethan Pork! PRESENTATION The package retails at £9.50 and offers three programs on two tapes. One program is the Menu Planner and the other two are recipe instructions. Documentation for the package is limited but the programs are easy to load and self-explanatory. FEATURES The Menu Planner is basically an index and the main menu offers five selections, each of which leads onto more specific program menus. The sort facility allows you to choose dishes by country, such as France, Italy, Hungary and England; by case of preparation; and by preparation time or price, all on scales of one to four. This scale does not go far enough and can be misleading; when it says £=4 it really means 'quite expensive'. The Store Cupboard option lets you select a main ingredient and then gives you recipe suggestions using this. Recipe Details list the main ingredients for each recipe, together with indications of the relative price, simplicity and preparation time. The Recipe List shows all the recipes stored, in alphabetical order. Choose Wine suggests one good wine and a cheaper alternative for each dish; it covers starters, the main course and desserts. IN USE I looked in the fridge, found I had some pork pieces and decided to see what I could do with them. Having selected Store Cupboard, I was able to select pork and other meats, which took me on to a further list of various pork cuts. Selecting the pork pieces from the list I went on to the final selection which asked me to enter what type of dish the main ingredient was for-starters, main course, dessert, vegetables or miscellaneous. Anyway, in my case, the pork was for a main course and up popped my recipe - stuffed peppers. I returned to the main menu and Recipe Details gave me some idea of the other ingredients needed, together with the ratings for cost, ease and cooking time. The second tape details recipes for dishes given in the Menu Planner. One track of the tape covers starters and main courses; the other has desserts, vegetables and miscellaneous dishes. For each recipe the program will calculate the necessary quantities of ingredients for up to 200 diners. For each type of dish, 20 different recipes are evenly grouped by country. Some main ingredients are limited, though. There is only one main course fish dish, a rather unadventurous fish pie. The program suffers from inconsistent menu selection procedures. Sometimes you have to press a single key, at other times you have also to press ENTER. This may betray inelegant programming. At one point the program asks you to press any other key to continue when it really means one of three. Actually pressing any other key results in one of a half-dozen, rather facetious, error messages. I felt suggested dish combinations would have been helpful. The structuring of the programs should allow you to move between sections rather more easily. Once you've chosen a dish it's only natural to want to check out how to prepare it and it was tiring to have to load another program to look at the cooking method. Several elements in the programs stand out as positive advantages, such as the speed with which you move from one section to another. Facilities for printout give you an instant shopping list. Calculation of quantities offers the choice of imperial or metric units, and there are also wine suggestions. VERDICT Bug-Byte has succeeded in producing an unusual package with helpful tips and hints, suggested wines and hard-copy facilities, which would make a useful addition to many software collections. However, room for improvement shows in program design and scope, even within the memory limitations of the Spectrum. Here's a major games publisher looking at other uses for the home micro and I hope the trend will continue. Such programs may even encourage those who would not normally use a micro. Nonetheless, for the price, I could buy a good cookery book with far more recipes and mouth-watering photographs.