Product Reviews

MacGourmet Deluxe is a recipe organiser - and more - and its designers have very cleverly based its interface around Apple's familiar Mail application. The list of recipes appears in the top pane, the formatted recipe itself in the lower pane, and at the left-hand side there are a number of folders - User Lists - where recipes can be ordered by type. However, MacGourmet Deluxe also takes some cues from iTunes, in that the main recipe collection is akin to your iTunes library, and different User Lists can contain the same recipe - just like playlists. The whole application is Spotlight-aware, enabling you to instantly search by keyword, and the search can be restricted to categories, including ingredient, name or description.

To get you started, MacGourmet Deluxe offers the option of downloading around 80 recipes from its website. You can then peruse them and get afeel for the recipe layout used before entering your own. One problem with these recipes is that they're all in imperial measures, and there's no way to convert them to metric. They're also very US-centric. There's a Units setting in Preferences that can be set to imperial or metric, but this has no effect on recipes already in the database.

The other method of getting recipes in is manually. Choose New and a multi-tab window opens with tabs for

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Name, Ingredients, Directions, Preparation, Notes, Picture and Nutrition. The Ingredients tab tries to help by presenting a list of possible alternatives (in quantities) or by predicting the name of an ingredient. This can save ontyping, but while MacGourmet Deluxe remembers new ingredients that you enter, it doesn't remember directions, so you have to enter, for example, 'finely sliced' by hand each time. Once all the details are in, MacGourmet Deluxe does a nice job of presenting it all cleanly and clearly, and there are several recipe templates to choose from. You can also link related recipes using the Relationship Manager. Related items appear in a field at the end of the recipe. This is a neat idea, but could be implemented better: hyperlinks directly in the ingredients list would be preferable. Further, the related item opens in its own window, not in MacGourmet Deluxe itself.

Menus can also be captured directly from web pages, but only allrecipes.com, epicurious.com, foodnetwork.com, williams-sonoma.com, cookinglight.com and food.yahoo.com are supported - again, they're all US sites with imperial measures. This feature is accessed from the browser's Services menu, not from MacGourmet Deluxe's, and is supported only by Safari, Camino and Opera. It works well on most sites. For non-supported sites there's the option to save the text as a Web Clip and arrange it yourself.

The Deluxe in the title means there are three plug-ins included. First is the Meal Planner, which enables you to plan a week's cooking in advance and makes the relevant shopping lists. The second calculates the nutritional value of recipes. And the third provides publishing facilities: you can publish your recipes to the web, using MobileMe or WebDav or make entire PDF cookbooks for printing.

MacGourmet Deluxe is packed with features and is a real boon to amateur chefs. We'll be making a lot of use of it.