BigOven does alphabetize them, but it is case sensitive. Chances are, your recipe box is called "Xmas 2007" and then "beef". In the ASCII sort order, capital X comes before lower case "b".
To rectify this, try right clicking on the recipe box name, and renaming it using all-caps, or at least capitalizing the first letter. Since BigOven won't do anything if the new name = the old name, though, you might need to make it slightly different, e.g., "BeefRecipes", then then rename it again to "Beef".