I’m thinking that the perfect tech app for the up-to-date New Depression kitchen would be a recipe cost calculator.

It shouldn’t be too hard to build a database that contains:

• the ingredients for the family’s most commonly cooked meals
• the quantities needed for the recipe
• the quantities in which the ingredients must be purchased
• an average cost for the ingredients

A basic html/php interface would allow you to:

• select a meal from a searchable drop-down
• do a one-time exclusion of any of the ingredients from the total if you already had them in the pantry
• handle basic substitutions (say sausage for hamburger, etc.)
• allow you to enter a one-time or permanent price modification (to account for sales or price increases)

Of course, it would be optimum if there were a readily accessible and continuously updated dbase of grocery store average prices out there that you could periodically download but I doubt such a thing currently exists.

Thus when it came time to plan menus for the week, you could use the tool to get a more precise sense of how much everything is going to cost before you get to the grocery store. I’m always amazed when I do a one-off trip to see how much a basic meal can run you…

Such a thing may already exist. I don’t know; I haven’t checked yet. But it sure would be cool if it did…