How we research a recipe

Every recipe and story on Forgotten Drink starts with a book, a menu, a letter or a newspaper that someone wrote at the time. We read the original, check it against other records from the same years, say plainly what it does and does not prove, and only then adapt it for a modern glass. This page explains how that works, so you can judge what you read here.

Where do the recipes come from?

From period sources: bar manuals and household cookbooks from the 1500s to the mid-1900s, soda-fountain guides, menus, letters and newspapers, with translations of older Roman and medieval texts. Each recipe names the book and page it follows, and where a free public scan of the same edition exists, many pages link to it so you can read the page yourself.

We do not take recipes from other websites, and we do not reconstruct a drink from a literary description alone. If a novel mentions a drink but no period recipe for it survives, we say so rather than invent one.

How do we check a source?

Before a word of the story is written, we build a research record for it: the page scan of the central passage, its exact wording, a close translation where the source is not in English, the edition and its date, and the printed page number. We read the whole passage, including the author’s own warnings and objections, not just the line that makes a good quote.

Then we look for a second kind of record. A recipe proves that someone recommended a drink; it does not prove that anyone made it, drank it, or that it did what its author promised. So we look for a dated menu, an advertisement, a diary entry or a newspaper report that shows the drink in use, and we say what we found. When a claim appears in several books, we check whether later authors copied earlier ones before treating them as separate witnesses.

For every piece, someone who did not write it reads the finished draft against the sources, checks the quotations, dates, quantities and arithmetic, and sends it back if anything does not hold.

What do we change when we adapt a recipe?

Old recipes assume knowledge a modern reader may not have: what a wine-glass held, how much a gill is, how long “till it is clear” takes. We fill those gaps with stated assumptions, and each recipe’s notes say what we changed and why. Quantities are converted to milliliters, fluid ounces and grams, and often scaled down from a bowl meant for a whole party. Where an old ingredient no longer exists or is unsafe, we name the substitute and explain the difference, and we keep the original text on the page where its copyright allows, so you can see what we started from.

We also check modern safety guidance for anything the original did not know about: raw eggs, fermentation, bottling under pressure and storage. Where a period method is not safe to follow as written, we say so beside the method rather than quietly altering it.

Drinks without alcohol get the same research. A recipe marked “Always alcohol-free” was made that way in its period; an “Alcohol-free version” adapts a drink that had alcohol in its source, and the page says what changed. Old prices stay as printed, with a rough present-day equivalent beside them, converted by each country’s own official price index.

What do we not claim?

We do not claim that a drink tasted the way its modern version tastes, that the people in a story actually drank it, or that a menu shows what was drunk rather than what was offered. We do not present a modern adaptation as the lost original, and we say “the earliest we found” rather than “the first”. Where the evidence runs out, the page says where. Each story ends with its sources, listed in full.

Why go to this trouble?

Because the history is the point. Franklin’s milk punch is a good recipe; it means more once you know it is the receipt he sent James Bowdoin with a letter of October 11, 1763, on a sheet that still survives in Boston, and that the 1762 date in some modern accounts does not match the manuscript. We would rather publish fewer recipes that we can stand behind than more that we cannot.

What if we got something wrong?

If you know a source we have missed, or spot a mistake, write to us. When we find an error, we fix the page.