FAQs – Legendary Recipes

Where do you get the recipes?

I started collecting restaurant recipes back in 2003 or 2004 and never stopped. Along the way I broadened the universe to include all kinds of other public eating places: cafeterias and coffee shops, taverns and bars, hotels and motels, golf courses and country clubs—you name it. I find recipes in old newspapers and magazines, in cookbooks (I have more than 5,000!), in the files of libraries all over the country, and, of course, online.

How many recipes do you have?

I have no real way to count all the recipes in my collection (which grows virtually every day), but I’d guess that I have more than a million—spanning more than 100 years—from restaurants, hotels, and other eating places. I’ve indexed several hundred thousand of those in a database that I constantly update, but it’s a job that never ends.

How do you determine if a recipe is authentic?

Generally, my standard is simple: Did the recipe come directly from the establishment’s owner, manager, chef, or other such “official” source? Once in a while, though, I’ll consider the provenance adequately established if the recipes comes directly from a relative of an owner or an employee of the restaurant.

I do not print “clone” or “copycat” recipes, or recipes of fuzzy provenance.

Do you test the recipes?

No. Years ago, when I started working on this project, I thought I’d try each recipe before publishing (or republishing) it, but I quickly realized that I’d never get this website done the way I wanted if I spent more time in the kitchen than in my office. I do love to cook, though, and you’ll see some recipes on this site that I have tried out at home. Wherever possible I pass along my thoughts, and I hope you’ll do the same.

There’s another reason I don’t test the recipes. I didn’t eat most of these dishes where they were originally served, so I can’t really tell how precisely replicate but I know that many, many other people out there did. So I’m hoping that if your taste buds fondly remember one of the dishes on the site, you’ll try making it at home and let the rest of us know the results.

How do you select the restaurants and recipes?

I don’t really have a system for that; it’s pretty random. In addition to printing a recipe, I want to tell the history of the establishment behind it. That means when it opened, when it closed, and the story, as best I can determine it, of the founders and any other owners who may have followed in their footsteps. Sometimes restaurants go out with a splash, but often they are just quietly shuttered, which can make establishing the year of closing extremely difficult.

I also aim, of course, to represent the broadest possible spectrum of restaurants—from elegant hotel dining rooms and department store tearooms to mom-and-pop cafes and coffee shops. I try, too, to include places all over the country.

Do you print recipes in their original form?

I’ve tried to establish a consistent style for presenting recipes, which often means editing the instructions for modern use. Example: What temperature did “medium oven” mean in the 1950s?

Sometimes I also change the presentation of ingredients. If a recipe specifies adding a No. 2 can of tomatoes, for example, I convert it to 2 1/2 cups for the sake of consistency. Once in a while I run across ingredients once made by institutional providers that no longer exist, so I’ll typically use a substitute in the list of ingredients, explaining the swap in a note. MSG, for example, was originally marketed in the United States as “Gourmet Powder,” but you won’t find that in any store today.

Once in a while I present a recipe in its exact original form because it’s either impossible to convert to an updated form or because the original presentation is interesting in and of itself.

What if I’m interested in a restaurant or recipe but don’t see it here?

Let me know. Chances are good that I have it or can find it.

How can I help?

I’m always on the hunt for community cookbooks that contain recipes from local restaurants and other establishments, so if you have one you think I’d find useful for the purposes of this website please let me know.

Over the years I’ve had some friends help by going to local libraries and combing through their clipping or vertical files for recipes, so I’m always grateful for that kind of assistance and will credit the help when I publish the restaurant history and recipe.

I’m also interested in postcards or other images—including menus, matchbooks, and other ephemera—that I can use to illustrate the stories. I have more than 90,000 postcards in my collection, along with boxloads of matchbook covers and thousands of menus. I’ve scanned only a fraction of them to date.

What about recipes classified as “house secrets”?

Not many recipes really are secrets. I’ve found many instances where restaurant owners or managers allowed a recipe to be printed and later declare it to be a house secret or family secret.

Comments?

Thanks for stopping by LegendaryRecipes.com and sampling our fare. We welcome respectful, relevant, friendly comments and observations. I edit comments for style (if needed) before they are published and delete anything that’s offensive, inappropriate, generally rude, or purely commercial in nature.

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