Why variants coexist
Ask where couscous comes from and you will get several answers, all sincere, often irreconcilable. The usual reflex of a cooking site is to settle it: one page, one origin, one "authentic" recipe. We do the opposite.
A recipe is a version, not a truth
What someone publishes here is their version: their family's, their city's, their own hand. It carries one final coordinate — a point, never an area, never a territory. Someone else, elsewhere, will publish theirs at their own point. Both pages exist, both are indexed, and neither points to the other as an original.
That is a technical choice as much as an editorial one. Nothing in our database can mark a version as canonical: the column does not exist. A dish family groups versions for navigation, but it lists — it does not rank.
Titles claim nothing
A title cannot contain "authentic", "the real", "traditional", or their equivalents. This is not a style preference: it is refused by the database, whatever the write path. The imposed format is Dish name — City, Country, and the right-hand side is rewritten from the chosen place, which carries the coordinate. A title therefore cannot claim an origin the point contradicts.
Describe what makes your version yours — its city, its season, its technique, what your grandmother did — rather than its legitimacy. It reads better, and it can be checked.
Debate is content, not authority
As soon as a dish is cooked in at least three countries, a poll opens automatically, with the countries actually represented on the map as its options. You can vote, argue, cite sources.
That poll determines nothing. It moves no point, changes no recipe, alters neither ranking nor visibility. Technically the flow only runs one way: published recipes build the poll's options, never the reverse. What the result does show is interesting for another reason: the breakdown of votes by the voter's country mostly tells you where people are speaking from.
What we ask of contributions
A personal photograph, taken by you — not an image found elsewhere. At least 800 characters of text, at least four ingredients and three steps. These thresholds exist for a precise reason: without them, the variants of one dish end up reading word for word alike, and the map loses what makes it worth looking at.
What we do not do
- Name the "official" origin of a dish.
- Rank versions against each other.
- Let a poll change a geographic value.
- Draw borders or assign territories.