Tool for investigating dependency chains?

[Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net>]

I'm in the process of doing some idiosyncratic minimalistic 
installs using
the "--no-install-recommends" option of apt-get.

What I would like to do is enter the package name. The tool's 
response would be a list of the recommended packages and their 
associated description from packages.gz. At the moment the 
referenced repository would be a distribution DVD.

It's doable completely manually, but ;/

TIA