The Method
01 — The template
Each dish page starts with a procedural template: the moves of the dish in order, with no quantities and no times. This is the “Mishnah” — the canonical thing the commentary will argue with. We write the template to be uncontroversial; the controversy lives in the margins.
02 — The commentary (Old Guard)
The left column collects the dish’s canonical voices — published chefs, cookbook authors, the people whose version of the dish is widely treated as the reference. Each entry is keyed to a step number where relevant.
03 — The counterpoint (Heresies)
The right column collects the heretics, the home cooks, the food scientists, and the working pros who would do it differently. Some of these positions are widely held; some are minority reports. Both belong on the page.
04 — The arguments
Below the spread, we name the recurring debates around the dish — cream or no, guanciale or pancetta, salt early or salt late — and pair the strongest case for each side with its attributed source.
05 — Attribution
Every quote on every page must have: a named contributor, a role, and a direct link to the source. We use real publications, real books, real chefs. Where a quote is paraphrased from a longer interview or video, we say so and link the original.
06 — What we will not do
We will not publish full recipes. We will not invent quotes. We will not strip attribution to make the page look cleaner. The point of Cookbook Conversations is that the conversation has names attached to it.
Edition 0.1 is a working draft. As we publish more pages, the citations will tighten and a small number of placeholder URLs in the early entries will be replaced with the real published sources we reference in spirit.