Sources and References
What counts as a source for a claim about this cuisine, and why other recipe sites are not one.
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Most of what is on this site comes from cooking. But claims about where a dish comes from, what an ingredient does, or what a tradition means need something behind them, and this page sets out what we accept.
Sources we use
- Regional cookbooks and community collections, particularly older ones compiled within the communities concerned.
- Food history writing that shows its own sources. Work that cites where it got a claim is worth far more than work that asserts it confidently.
- Food science references for technique questions: why parboiled rice holds moisture differently, what happens during a lactic fermentation, why acid added to a boiling pot turns bitter.
- Direct conversation with cooks from the region. For a version of a dish specific to a district or community, someone who cooks it is the primary source, and we say when a version came to us that way.
- Our own kitchen. Every method claim rests on having cooked it.
Sources we do not use
We do not source claims from other recipe websites. Errors propagate between them very fast, and a statement appearing on twenty sites is usually one unsourced claim copied nineteen times, not twenty independent confirmations.
We do not treat marketing copy from food brands as evidence about ingredients or history.
We do not use language models as sources of fact. They reproduce the same circulating claims without the ability to tell a sourced one from an invented one.
How we cite
Where a claim is specific and contestable, the guide says where it came from in the text, because a reader should not have to dig to find out whether something is established or is one family's practice. We prefer plain attribution in a sentence over a footnote nobody reads.
When we do not know
The origins of many dishes in this cuisine are genuinely unclear. When we cannot establish something, the guide says so. An honest "this is disputed" is more useful than a confident story that turns out to be invented, and readers can then go looking themselves.
Telling us about a source
If you know of a source that supports or contradicts something we have written, please send it through the contact page. Corrections are handled under our fact-checking policy.