An On-Line Recipe Swap Meet

Who needs the backyard fence when you can hang out online and swap recipes? AllRecipes.com is a well-organized collection of about 8,500 recipes sent in by ordinary folks--your friends and neighbors--rather than chefs and professionals. There’s Kay and her Wine Sauce Chicken, Holly and her Wisconsin Cheese Soup and Marinara Sauce from Phyllis’s momma.

Launched in 1987 with 200 cookies as Cookierecipe.com, AllRecipes.com has grown into an umbrella site for other “.com” recipe archives, including those devoted to pasta, barbecue recipes, vegetarian dishes and Thanksgiving favorites.

Recipes are presented in a clean format, and you can opt for printing them the size of a recipe card. With a click you can convert to metric, though two recipes we converted gave us enough oddball measurements--a mixture of milligrams and ounces--to send a Mars probe plummeting. There’s also a recipe exchange where users can post recipe requests, cooking questions or recipes in reply. The site’s staff can answer recipe questions through a “feedback” area, but really, can they drop a few bits of gossip like a neighbor at the fence? Probably not.

https://www.allrecipes.com