We've been using Mastercook from its earliest days. We were beta
testers for version 2 around 1993. It's not perfect, but neither are
any of the alternatives.
For many years, we were involved in low-fat cooking, so nutritional
analysis was an important feature. MC automatically recognizes
ingredients as they are entered or as a recipe is imported - some of
the other programs don't. It's also easy to add ingredients, to
change nutitional data for an ingredient, and to use a recipe as an
ingredient in another recipe.
Mastercook can handle large numbers of cookbooks and large numbers of
recipes in each cookbook.
Mastercook has been through some ups and downs over the years. Around
the time of MC2 the developers sold themselves to Sierra On-Line. MC3
came out shortly after. Sierra didn't understand the market very well
- they were primarily a game company - so subsequent releases were
somewhat buggy. We used MC3 for many years. In 2002, MC was acquired
by ValuSoft, which has done better. We finally switched from MC3 to
MC9 in 2005, running on Windows XP.
The current version is MC11, released in 2010. MC11 is compatible
with Windows Vista and 7. We have no problem running MC11 on 32-bit
XP and 64-bit Vista and 7.
Many of the changes over the years have been to add useless (to us)
features related to printer formats - you can use MC to make a nice
looking cookbook, but they didn't break any of the useful features in
the process.
Mastercook is available from valusoft.com for $19.99.
Other resources:
yahoo groups: MasterCook and MastercookDiscussion
http://mastercook_cupboard.tripod.com/
http://home.earthlink.net/~kitpath/
http://mc6help.tripod.com/
Jeff & Reggie