How we research a recipe

Every recipe and story on this site starts with a menu, a cookbook, a letter or a newspaper that someone wrote at the time. We read the original, check it against other records from the same years, say plainly what it does and does not prove, and only then adapt it for a modern kitchen. This page explains how that works, so you can judge what you read here.

Where do the recipes come from?

From period sources we hold as page scans and read on the page itself: Roman farm and cookery texts, household cookbooks and professional kitchen manuals from the 1730s to the 1940s, army regulations, government food leaflets, ships’, hotels’ and banquet menus, diaries and newspapers. Each recipe names the book and the page we used.

We do not take recipes from other websites, and we do not invent a dish from a passing mention. If a diary or a menu names a dish but nothing says how it was made, we say so. Where the records describe a dish well enough to rebuild it from period recipes for its parts, the recipe is labeled a reconstruction and names what it was built from.

How do we check a source?

Before a word of the story is written, we build an evidence sheet for it: the page image of the central passage, its exact wording, a close translation where the source is not in English, the edition and its date, and the printed page number. We read the whole passage, including the author’s own qualifications and objections, not just the line that makes a good quote.

Then we look for a second kind of record. A recipe proves that someone recommended a dish; it does not prove that anyone cooked it, ate it, or that it did what its author promised. So we look for a dated menu, an invoice, an advertisement, a diary entry or a newspaper report that shows the dish in use, and we say which of those we found. A cookbook recipe for a dish on a menu is never presented as the chef’s own: each recipe says whether it is the event’s own recipe, a period recipe for the dish, one printed a generation later, or a reconstruction. When a claim appears in several books, we check whether later authors copied earlier ones before treating them as separate witnesses.

For every piece, someone who did not write it reads the finished draft against the sources, checks the quotations, dates, quantities and arithmetic, and sends it back if anything does not hold. When it comes back revised, the review is repeated on what changed.

What do we change when we adapt a recipe?

Old recipes assume knowledge a modern cook may not have: how hot a “quick oven” is, what a wineglass holds, how long “until done” takes. We fill those gaps with stated assumptions, and each recipe says what we changed and why. Quantities are converted to modern units and often scaled down from a batch meant for a household of twelve or a regiment. Where an old ingredient no longer exists or is unsafe, we name the substitute and explain the difference. Where the book is out of copyright, the original text stays on the page so you can see what we started from.

We also check modern food-safety guidance for anything the original did not know about: raw eggs, cured meats, preserving, and temperatures. Where a historical method is not safe to follow as written, we say so beside the method rather than quietly altering it.

What do we not claim?

We do not claim that a dish tasted the way it tastes today, that the people in a story actually ate it, or that a menu card shows what was eaten rather than what was offered. We do not present a modern adaptation as the lost original. Where the evidence runs out, the page says where, and each article keeps what is documented apart from what is legend in a “Fact or legend?” box. Each story ends with its sources, listed in full.

Why go to this trouble?

Because the history is the point. An apple pie made without apples is a curious recipe; it is more interesting as a Richmond kitchen’s answer to the shortages of 1863, and that only means something if the date, the book and the shortage are real. You can see how that piece was put together in the sources for the Richmond story.We would rather publish fewer recipes that we can stand behind than more that we cannot.

Tell us if we got something wrong

If you know a source we have missed, or spot a mistake,write to us. We check it against the sources and correct the page. More about who we are is on the About page.