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Recipe Archives->A history of rec.food.recipes

Like pretty much all of Usenet, rec.food.recipes has a history. People not familiar with it often are confused, so Tricia thought it'd be a good idea if I wrote up this file explaining what has gone on before.

To properly cover this topic, we must go back into the Dark Ages of Usenet, not too long after the Great Renaming (a major reorganization of the newsgroup hierarchies into the current structure). Back around the mid-80's. To a newsgroup many consider to be the direct precursor of rec.food.recipes, alt.gourmand (one of the early moderated newsgroups). Its moderator, Brian Reid, had very specific ideas about what he thought should go into the newsgroup and was meticulous with the way recipes were formatted and presented.

The newsgroup went idle circa 1988 and the recipes that had been posted were collected into what's commonly called The Usenet Cookbook. It's a smallish archive, containing about 500 recipes. It was orginally put into a format called troff, but other versions are available as people have since converted it into ASCII, Meal Master and various other formats. There are many mirrors of the Usenet Cookbook, the original being archived at: ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/recipes/

Fast forward a couple years. In February of 1990, Andrew Mossberg ran a successful newsgroup proposal to create rec.food.recipes. It originally was proposed to split off articles containing recipes from rec.food.cooking and was made moderated to keep it on topic. Andy kept an archive as well and being he's a vegetarian, organized his archive to cater to vegetarians, which is why it's separated into meat and non-meat categories.

Like the Usenet Cookbook, aem's rfr archive is mirrored all over the place, the original being here: ftp://mthvax.cs.miami.edu/pub/recipes

Early in 1992, circumstances became that Andy was unable to moderate the newsgroup anymore and searched several months for a replacement moderator, finally passing the newsgroup over to Mary Shafer in mid 1992. Mary didn't moderate very long, only around six months, too busy being an aerospace engineer and all. She asked me if I would take over moderating the newsgroup in November of '92 and I agreed.

I made a lot of changes while I moderated. Having never doing anything like moderate a newsgroup before, it was a learning process. I had lots of fun, met lots of great people, received lots of marvelous recipes. Probably the greatest change was the addition of the moderation team. It went from moderation as a solo effort, to me and a cast of others, making an incredible difference.

I set up the ftp archive in July of 1993, and the http archive about a year later. The ftp archive has been discontinued, but you may find the http archive here: http://recipes.taronga.com/

Valerie Whitmore, another one of the rec.food.recipes moderators, keeps an archive in calendar format. It is located here: http://www.cdkitchen.com/rfr/

In April of 1995, I asked Patricia Hill, then one of my co-moderators if she would like to assume the role as lead moderator. She responded that she would be pleased to do so, and I stepped down from my position. Tricia still moderates the newsgroup to date, as I still maintain the archive.

There is one more collection of recipes worthy of mention and that is Amy Gale's rec.food.recipes site. Amy lives in New Zealand and is a dear friend of mind (from the net, we've never met in person). About the time I started my archive on Neosoft, she said she'd like to do a parallel one of her own. I said go for it, and she did, and collected recipes from over a three month period of time from rec.food.recipes. Amy's archive, while having some overlap with mine, is a completely separate endeavour. It was orginally set up at vuw.ac.nz but was later moved here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/

As always, these archives carry copyrights by their respective authors. Please acknowledge and honor them.

Stephanie da Silva
arielle at taronga.com
June 14, 1997
March 26, 1999 (revised)

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rec.food.recipes archive © 1993-2007 Stephanie da Silva
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