Fact-Checking Policy
How we verify claims about regions, ingredients and history, and exactly what happens when you tell us we got something wrong.
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Recipes are mostly method, but they carry claims too: that a dish comes from a particular region, that an ingredient behaves a certain way, that a tradition means something. Those claims get checked.
What gets checked
- Regional and community attributions. If we say a version is Udupi or Kottayam or Chettinad, we need a basis for it, and we name the version rather than calling it authentic.
- Ingredient behaviour. Claims about what parboiled rice does, why fenugreek helps fermentation, or why lemon turns bitter when boiled are checked against food science references and against our own testing.
- Historical claims. These get the most scepticism. Food origin stories circulate widely and are frequently unsourceable. Where we cannot establish something, the page says the history is unclear rather than repeating a tidy story.
- Anything a reader disputes.
Sources we rely on
Regional cookbooks and community recipe collections, food history writing with visible sourcing, food science references for technique questions, and direct conversation with cooks from the region concerned. Our approach to citing them is described in the sources and references policy.
We do not treat other recipe websites as sources. Errors propagate between them quickly and a claim appearing on twenty sites is not twenty pieces of evidence.
Reporting a correction
Email us through the contact page. It helps enormously if you tell us which page and which sentence, and what you believe the correct version is. If you are correcting a regional claim, telling us where your version comes from is more useful than telling us ours is wrong.
What happens next
- We acknowledge your message, normally within three business days.
- We check the claim. For method questions this may mean cooking the dish again, which takes longer.
- If you are right, we correct the page, update the last-modified date, and note the change on the page where it is substantive.
- If we cannot verify either version, we soften the claim to reflect the genuine uncertainty rather than leaving a confident statement standing.
Corrections we will not make
We will not remove a regional version because someone considers a different one the only correct one. Variation is real, and documenting it is part of the point of this site.