It's this time of year when my wife begins the annual cooking frenzy.
Like most American families, we believe that the holidays wouldn't be complete without a kitchen filled with homemade cookies, cakes, pies, breads, casseroles and roasts.
We have a small collection of cookbooks, a dozen or so, which probably contain fewer than 1,500 recipes. Sounds like a lot, until you compare it to what's available on the Internet.
Recipes are a natural for archiving on the Internet. No one really owns them, they're widely traded and collected, and most people (at least those who don't cook for a living) seem pleased to share their best.
The largest recipe database is the Searchable Online Archive of Recipes http://soar.berkeley.edu/recipes. SOAR contains 38,716 recipes - everything from a simple hamburger to a whole camel stuffed with sheep, turkeys, fish and dates and roasted in banana leaves http://soar.berkeley.edu/recipes/weird/baked-camel1.rec.
SOAR is organized both by category and ethnic origin and can easily be searched, either the entire database or sections.
The Betty Crocker site http://www.bettycrocker.com allows a different sort of search: tell it what you have handy, and it recommends recipes. Or plan a week's worth of menus, and the site automatically creates the necessary shopping list.
Of course, you can just take the simple route and search for recipes from the Betty Crocker Cookbook.
The Betty Crocker site is one of many commercial sites designed to help consumers in the kitchen. Butterball.Com http://www.butterball.com will tell you just about anything you need to know about preparing turkeys, including recipes for side dishes, stuffing, gravy and leftovers (ready for Zesty Turkey & Peanut Soup?).
For kids, an archive of recipes for Rice Krispies Treats (candy cane treats, spicy raisin treats) can be found at the Kellogg's Rice Krispies site http://www.treatsrecipes.com.
There are so many sites that offer recipes that the search site Yahoo! divides the links into 33 categories http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Food_and_Eating/Recipes/.
Holiday menus: Better Homes and Gardens' Holiday Entertaining Guide http://www.bhglive.com/survival/planner.html offers entire preplanned menus for Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Christmas meals.
Historical: For an unusual Christmas dinner, the Medieval/Renaissance Food Homepage http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/food.html offers links to sites that have recipes and information about meals of the middle ages.
Vegetarian: The VegSource http://www.vegsource.org boasts an archive of more than 5,000 meatless recipes, and the British Vegetarian Society (http://www.vegsoc.org/Info/xmas.html offers complete holiday menus.
Bread and biscuits: The Bread Recipe archive from the newsgroup rec.food.recipes has recipes for yeast and quick breads, and the Village Bakery http://www.countrylife.net/bread/ offers a good beginners guide to bread making as well as a course in making sourdough.
Mixed drinks: The Webtender http://www.webtender.com has a searchable database of more than 3,500 drinks. Although most require booze, about 200 can be made ''virgin.''
Restaurant recipes: Want to re-create the wonderful flavors of your favorite chain restaurant without leaving home? CopyKat Recipes http://www.copykat.com posts directions to create popular dishes. Some are provided by the restaurants, others are good guesses.
Cookies: Cookie Recipe.Com http://www.cookierecipe.com contains hundreds of recipes as well as a section on holiday confections. Nice feature: With a click of the button you can convert to metric, print out the recipe for filing in a book or e-mail the recipe to a friend.
Don't miss the recipe from the famous ''Neiman-Marcus cookie'' urban legend http://www.wester.net/Neiman-Marcus.html. The story's total fiction, but the recipe makes one of the best chocolate-chip cookies I've ever tasted.
Send e-mail to Charles Brewer at CBrewer@enquirer.com. This column and Charles Brewer's past columns can be found at The Enquirer's Web site http //enquirer.com/columns/brewer.
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