'Gourmet' feels internet bite as too many cooks go online

NET RESULTS:The Kitchen Computer has finally come to pass, but not as the makers intended, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

IN THE Computer History Museum at Mountain View, California, I have quite a few favourites among the many elegant old bits of disused hardware. The “Johnniac” mainframe (named for computing pioneer John von Neumann) with its glass panelled case and Cadillac-style nameplate; the mammoth Cray supercomputer with its hanging, orderly mats of colourful wiring; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s own Apple 1 in a wooden case, signed, simply, “Woz” in thick black marker pen.

But the one that always makes me smile is the ultra cool-looking but utterly ridiculous Kitchen Computer. This one-off item from 1969 is a Honeywell H316 minicomputer embedded into a red and white, slightly uneven tabletop.

Well, that doesn’t really do it justice. It is an extraordinary piece of design and is to tabletops what a Ferrari is to cars and actually looks vaguely racing car-like – or perhaps, alien spaceship-like – from a front-on view.

It was created as a groovy gift for the housewife with everything in the 1969 Christmas catalogue for the very upmarket Neiman Marcus department store. It cost $10,000, came with a two-week programming course (the little lady would need it, given that the only interface was lights and switches) and was intended to store her recipes.

“If only she can cook as well as Honeywell can compute,” ran the line in the catalogue. They never sold a single one.

It’s easy to laugh at the notion, but actually, as anyone of a certain age might recall, the first proper home PCs were repeatedly marketed on the idea that they’d be perfect for storing recipes.

The IBM press release announcing the very first home computer stated as much. In a paragraph highlighting the system’s keyboard (yes, really!) and its “six-foot, coiled cable for flexibility”, IBM noted: “The 83 keys make it easy to write and edit text, enter data ranging from stock analysis to cooking recipes, figure business accounts, or play video games.”

Just in case Mother was concerned at the effort that might be required to learn how to enter her recipes into the machine, IBM explains that “an enhanced version of the popular Microsoft Basic programming language and easily understood operation manuals are included with every system.

“They make it possible to begin using the computer within hours and to develop personalised programs quite easily.”

Only a few hours to learn? No problem then! The basic model would have cost you $1,565 – if you hooked it up, like a proto-Mac Mini, to a television for a screen, and a tape cassette player for storage.

Otherwise, you’d be forking out twice that for a more “typical system for home or school” with 64kb of memory, “a single diskette drive and its own display”.

These slices of computing history came to mind recently when I was at my parents’ home in Silicon Valley and my mother mentioned that one of our favourite cookery magazines, Gourmet, was to shut down with the November issue.

Gourmet, a Condé Nast publication, was “a magazine of almost biblical status in the food world”, according to the Media Decoder blog in the New York Times.

Gourmet has been around since 1941 and always was the classy, conservative personality (if a bit stuffy sometimes) among the variety of food magazines my mother received over the years.

Its closure, due to the now familiar wail of “severe decline in ad revenues”, has had foodies coalescing to grieve on gustatory discussion boards like Chowhound.com (“for those who live to eat”).

Last month several posters lamented that Condé Nast had decided to axe patrician Gourmet while allowing inhouse rival, the lower-brow Bon Appétit, to live on (at least for now). The discussion was rather tasty in its own right. One poster complained of “Manhattan-style snobbery”, a condescension “so very 1990s”, against Bon Appétit. An annoyed member responded, “what the hell is Manhattan-style snobbery?” The riposte from another poster: “It’s tomato-based. New England-style snobbery has cream.”

But Gourmet is not actually dying, but going to that big cloud in the ether. Recipes will live on on Condé Nast’s vast foodie internet site, Epicurious.com, and on Gourmet.com during what the website describes vaguely as “a transitional period”. Ironic, as it is the internet, in part, which has done for print media revenue. Why buy the magazine when recipes appear online? Maybe not all of them, but surely enough to satisfy even ardent cooks. After all, my mother never made more than a couple of recipes per Gourmet issue.

I know I tend to go to the net first myself when thinking about what to cook, especially if I have a few things in the house and am not sure what to make with them. Type the ingredients you wish to use, and the word “recipe” into a search engine, and bingo, the choice is generally overwhelming.

And thus has the Kitchen Computer finally come to pass. Not as Honeywell or IBM imagined it, a place to store recipes, but as the medium through which millions of cooks tap into the bounty of recipes online. With the added bonus that having a little laptop on the kitchen counter to display the recipe is a heck of a lot easier than a computer-embedded table costing $10 grand.

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