These are the rules a page on AtlasPlate has to satisfy before it goes up. They exist because this site documents cooking traditions it has no first-hand claim to, which raises the standard rather than lowering it.
Sourcing
- A recipe follows a named source. A cookbook author, a community or diaspora cook, a regional food writer, a university extension or agricultural record. “Adapted from around the internet” is not a source and does not appear here.
- The source is named in the page, not buried. Attribution sits next to the claim it supports, so you can see which part of a recipe rests on whom.
- Where sources disagree, the page says so. Regional variation is information, not a problem to average away. A recipe that silently picks one version and calls it the dish is hiding the most interesting thing about it.
- A dish keeps its own name. Native spelling first, pronunciation note and plain-English description after. Translations that flatten a dish into an American analogue are not used as titles.
Substitutions
Ingredient access is a real constraint in most of the United States, and pretending otherwise makes a recipe useless. So substitutions are offered — and marked, every time, with what they change.
- What the swap alters: texture, acidity, fermentation time, colour, cooking time.
- When the swap goes far enough that the result should be called something else. Teff-free injera is a sour flatbread. It can be good. It is not injera, and the page will say so.
- Which swaps are common inside the cuisine itself. Home cooks in a tradition substitute too, and that is a different thing from an outsider’s shortcut.
Indigenous and community dishes
Some dishes on this site — Cherokee and other Native American foodways, Appalachian homestead cooking, Ethiopian fasting dishes tied to the Orthodox calendar — belong to living communities that hold their own authority over them. On those pages the community is named, the source is a voice from within it wherever one is available, and religious or ceremonial context is stated rather than stripped out to make a recipe look simpler. If a community source asks for a page to be changed or taken down, that request is honoured.
What this site does not claim
No page here claims first-hand experience of a cuisine, because the desk has none. There are no invented family memories, no fabricated travel and no borrowed heritage anywhere on this site. Authority comes from the sources a page cites, and it is your business to see who they are.
Corrections
A wrong recipe is worse than no recipe: someone spends money and an evening on it. Corrections are handled ahead of new publishing.
- A cook who grew up with a dish outranks any written source the desk can reach, published ones included.
- A substantive correction is made in the page itself and dated, not appended as a comment.
- Where a page cannot be fixed because the underlying sourcing was wrong, it comes down instead of being quietly patched.
- Corrections come in through the contact form.
Independence
As things stand the site carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content. No recipe has ever been placed, paid for or influenced by a brand, and the affiliate disclosure states the rules that apply the day any of that changes. A page will never recommend an ingredient or a piece of equipment because someone paid for the mention.