My Kitchen My Table

Mac Gourmet and Etoufette; replacing the recipe box.

by Louie DuMonde

My good friend Leon in New Orleans is a fourth generation Y’at of the crescent city who loves to cook. A few winters ago, over fabulous gin martinis, I brought up the discussion of the importance of familial recipes that get handed down through the generations. He got very excited and hoisted his portly frame across the kitchen to grab a black plastic index card box.

With all the reverence of a priest handling a chalice, he produced card after card of recipes. The cards were worn and splattered with sauces, a perfect testament to an active kitchen. There was, however, a few cards that were a little worse for wear and in need of rewrite to avoid total obliteration. He admitted that he needed to get around to the task, but as with all things like this, it just never gets done. I suggested that he should put them in a recipe database that he could keep on his computer. To use his words; “I thought I’d never see the day that I would need a user manual to keep track of the ingredients of my Etoufette.”

He had a point. The cross roads between computer and kitchen have always been narrow almost to the point of non-existence. That is until this year when Mariner Software released Mac Gourmet Deluxe, Recipe and Wine management software.

Going into this review, I was already jaded. There is a romance that is inherent to a recipe box like Leon’s, how could that ever be replaced by software? I think the designers of Mac Gourmet had the same notion. The software is not competing a with the recipe box as much as it is offering a viable alternative.

Most important in luring chefs away from the their boxes and notebooks is that the conversion to the computer needs to be easy. Mac Gourmet is just that. This convinced me in the first few minutes that it would be worth the time to enter all my recipe’s into the application. Having done that it wasn’t long until I discovered some of the other fabulous features of Mac Gourmet. Like the ability to email a recipe right from the software. This has been brilliant as requests come in for seasonal holiday recipes.

Another feature that I was surprisingly attracted to is the meal planner. Simply drag various recipes onto specific days of the week and press a button to create your shopping list. Mac Gourmet Deluxe will print out all the necessary ingredients for more organized and money efficient trips to the store and farmers market. But above all my favorite feature has to be the Chef’s View, a greatly enlarged screen view of your recipe, that allows you to keep your laptop on your kitchen table, out of harms way, but still close enough glance at with dirty hands. If you need a picture to remind you what your concoction is supposed to look like, Mac Gourmet Deluxe has room for images, either shot by you or found on the web.

Mac Gourmet Deluxe also lets you keep track of your favorite wines. If you are like me, always intending to write down those fabulous wine discoveries while galavanting around town, you now have a central place to store the details.

Mac Gourmet Deluxe has a more sophisticated features that you can delve into. Some may or may not be useful to you. But the folks at Mariner Software have cleverly integrated them out of the way of the core functionality of software leaving you the freedom to go shopping and get cooking.

The Mac Gourmet Deluxe interface if clean and intuitive, much like Apple’s Mail software program, making it easy to find or browse your recipes. Mariner software, the company that created Mac Gourmet Deluxe, is a veteran software company for whom databases are old hat. You can trust that your recipes will be safe to hand down to future generations. I’m giving Mac Gourmet Deluxe four and half out five shakes of the Cayenne for stability, ease of use, and keeping a focus on the core purpose of the product.

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