Methodology

This page explains how a recipe gets from an old printed page to this site, and where mistakes can creep in.

1. The text

We start with the Internet Archive’s machine-read text of a scanned book. That text is produced by software that reads the page image, so it contains errors: misread letters, broken words, stray marks. We do not correct them in the original. If the scan reads “oyaters”, the original on our page reads “oyaters”.

2. Finding the recipes

The book’s text is sent, a section at a time, to Google’s Gemini AI model. It is asked to find each complete recipe, copy the original wording exactly, and write a modern version. Recipes that are cut off at the edge of a section are skipped.

The copied original is then checked by a program against the scanned text. It must match word for word, ignoring only spacing and line breaks. If it does not match, the recipe is discarded. This check protects the original text. It does not check the modern version.

3. The modern version

The modern version is written by the AI. It converts old measures to US measures, gives oven temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit, rewrites the method as plain steps, and adds a safety note when the original method would not be safe today. Old recipes are often vague, with phrases like “a quick oven” or “butter the size of an egg”, so amounts and times in the modern version are estimates. It can be wrong. The original is always shown beside it so you can judge for yourself.

4. The photographs

The pictures are AI-generated. They are not photographs of a cooked recipe, and no one cooked the dish for the picture. They are made to look like an ordinary home kitchen, including small imperfections, and each one is captioned as a representation of how the dish might look when finished.

5. Review

A person approves every recipe before it is published. That review checks that the recipe makes sense and reads well. It is not a cooking test, so recipes are still not kitchen-tested.

What we do not do

• We do not show ratings or reviews.
• We do not make health or nutrition claims.
• We do not change the original text.