Old Kitchen Stories is an independent food site publishing tested recipes for European and American home cooking. We are not a content farm: every recipe on this site is developed, cooked, photographed, and written by a named contributor whose credentials appear at the bottom of each article.
Who we are
The site is run by a small group of home cooks and former professional cooks. Between us we have worked in restaurant kitchens, owned a neighbourhood bakery, competed on the barbecue circuit, and trained in Lyon, Naples, and Valencia. We write for people cooking in ordinary kitchens with ordinary equipment.
Our contributors
- Lena Marchetti — pasta and roasts. Twelve years in Italian-American kitchens.
- Daniel Hoffman — baking and desserts. Former bakery owner, nine years.
- Marcus Reed — grilling, burgers, barbecue. Competitive barbecue circuit.
- Camille Rousseau — French technique. Trained and worked in Lyon.
- Oliver Bennett — British regional comfort food.
- Pablo García — Spanish and Valencian regional cooking.
- Sofia Esposito — Neapolitan pizza and long-fermentation doughs.
How we test recipes
- Every recipe is cooked from start to finish a minimum of three times before publication.
- Testing happens in a standard home kitchen: a four-burner stovetop, a conventional oven, and cast-iron and stainless-steel pans. No commercial equipment.
- Dry ingredients are weighed in grams; oven temperatures are given in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.
- Each recipe records failure modes. If a step can go wrong, we say so and tell you how to fix it.
- Nutrition figures are calculated from the USDA FoodData Central database and are estimates only.
Our photography
All recipe photographs on this site are produced by our team. A portion of our photography is created with AI-assisted image generation and is edited by hand before publication. Images are labelled in their captions where relevant.
How we make money
Old Kitchen Stories is funded by advertising (Google AdSense) and, on some pages, affiliate commissions from retail links. Neither funding source influences which recipes we publish or what we say about them. We do not accept payment for recipe placement or positive coverage.
Advertising on this site
Advertising is what keeps the recipes free. We work to keep it unobtrusive and clearly separate from the cooking instructions:
- Ads are never placed inside an ingredient list or inside the numbered method steps, where they could be mistaken for part of the recipe.
- We do not ask visitors to click ads, and we do not use pop-ups, auto-playing media, sticky overlays, or any format that covers the content.
- Ad placements are reviewed whenever the page layout changes, so that advertising never sits between a cook and the step they are reading.
- We follow Google’s publisher policies and ad placement rules, including the rules on incentivised clicks and on ads that could be confused with site content.
If an advertisement ever gets in the way of reading a recipe, email [email protected] and we will move it.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions, and permission requests are welcome: email [email protected]. Our standards are documented in the Editorial Policy, and the limitations of our content are set out in the Disclaimer.