As food and recipes move across borders, through generations, and between language and cultures, they are continually translated: ingredients are substituted, techniques are adapted, measurements are reinterpreted, and memories are reshaped by new places and circumstances. These transformations do not diminish a recipe’s significance. Instead, they reveal the ways food carries histories, identities, and relationships while responding to the practical realities of migration, community, and everyday life.
The articles collected in this issue of The Recipes Project, Taste and Translation, explore translation in its many forms. Some examine the movement of recipes across languages and national boundaries, while others consider the transmission of culinary knowledge through families and communities or trace how dishes evolve in response to changing environments, available ingredients, and shifting cultural contexts. Together, they demonstrate that recipes are never static documents but living records whose meanings are continually negotiated through use, adaptation, and exchange.
The theme for this issue was inspired by an exhibition developed at Mississippi State University Libraries in 2025, called Recipes as Roots. The exhibit examined the role of recipes in preserving family histories, cultural traditions, and intergenerational memory. While the exhibition focused on the ways culinary knowledge is sustained within families – particularly through the often-overlooked labor of women – it also prompted broader questions about what happens when recipes travel beyond the households and communities that first gave them meaning.
How do recipes persist when they cross borders, generations, and languages?
What is preserved, what changes, and what new meanings emerge through adaptation?
The contributions gathered here offer diverse answers to those questions. Spanning multiple cultures, historical periods, and diasporic experiences, they reveal translation as an ongoing process of continuity and change. Whether transmitted through cookbooks, handwritten recipe books, oral tradition, migration, or communal practice, recipes serve not only as instructions for preparing food but also as vessels of memory, identity, and belonging. In tracing the many ways recipes are translated across time and space, this issue highlights the enduring capacity of food to connect people to one another while continually creating new cultural meanings.
The posts selected for this edition feature contributions from professional chefs, home cooks, archivists and librarians, food historians, educators, translators, and scholars working across a wide range of disciplines and institutions. Their posts will appear weekly, beginning August 4 and continuing every Tuesday through August 25.
From Tuscany to the Classroom: How Biroldo Continues to Evolve, by Daniel Bazzinotti
Lost in Knowledge and Translation: The ‘nutty Case of Nigerian Suya and “Suya Spice”, by Ozoz Sokoh
Grandma’s Savory French Toast, by Sarita Bhagwat
Arizona Mesquite Cornbread: An Irish and Native American Connection, by Amber Sampson
What were we eating? Salmon, seafood, and the diet of fishing and canning communities in British Columbia’s Salmonopolis, by Tatyana Beck
Curry, Casseroles and Cultural Exchange in Cold War Panama Canal Zone, by Ana Ramírez Luhrs
The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book: Community Building in Beirut, by Jennifer Brannock
Gelatin for Pig Rinds: Joyce Chen’s Translations of Chinese Home Cooking, by Jolin Chan
Translating a Santorini specialty: Santorini Tomato Fritters (GREEK: Ντοματοκεφτέδες), by Thei Zervaki
Smashed Between the Plantain: Connecting to the Past and Future, by Chris Cole and Caitlin Arens
Flavors in Exile: The Cuban and the Frita, by Christopher Fink and Elizabeth Nix
Tournez / Turn Page: Language, Memory, and Two Franco-American Recipe Scrapbooks, Rachel E. Churchand Anna Faherty
Carping about Gefilte Fish: Love, Labor and the Evolution of a Demanding Recipe in the Jewish-American Kitchen, by Tamar Gonen Brown
I Love Kewpie ♥️ Some Reflections on Mayonnaise in Postwar Japan, by Motoko Lezec and Kana Jenkins
Rice with Soda, by Chong Ntxoo Moua
Between Kitchens: My Yiayia’s Finikia and the Culture We Inherit, by Stephanie Sorosiak
Chocolatey Kichidi: An Adoptee’s Portal to the Past, by Janaea Eads
Marton Family Crescents: Adapting Vanillekipferls with Walnuts, by Jacquelyn D. Deppe (Marton)
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