How these records and recipes are made
Sources, evidence grades, how we write recipes, what we deliberately leave blank, and what we do not claim.
Two different claims, kept apart
Every dish page makes two claims that must not borrow credibility from each other. The first is cultural: an official Iranian source documents that this dish exists and where it is associated with. That claim carries the A-D evidence grade. The second is culinary: who wrote the method and the quantities. Where we wrote the recipe ourselves, the page says so and lists what we consulted. A tourism board documenting that a dish exists is not the same as a tourism board telling you how to cook it, and we do not let one stand in for the other.
Evidence grades
A: the source documents this dish directly. B: the source supports the dish or its geographic attribution, but not every field traces to one dish-specific page. C: support is partial. D: the dish can be named but no recipe is traceable, so no method is published and the page is marked reference-only. Grades describe the strength of the documentation, not the quality of the food.
How we write a recipe
We read at least three independent Persian cooking sources for each dish, prefer sources that give real quantities over ones that gesture, and then write the method from scratch in both languages. Recipes are not copyrightable — ingredients and procedures are facts and methods — but the writing around them is, so we never adapt anyone's prose. Every source we used is listed on the page with the date we read it.
Which version we publish
The ingredient list carries the version most Iranian households cook today. Common substitutions and shortcuts go in the cook's notes, so you know they exist without the main list becoming a menu of choices. Where a local version differs enough to be a different dish — a different protein and a different flavour base, or a name Persian sources treat as distinct — we give it its own record rather than flattening it into a footnote.
Where sources disagree
Cooks disagree, and pretending otherwise would make this site sound more certain than its evidence. Where sources split, the method follows the majority and the notes say plainly that another way exists. We do not quietly pick a side.
Measures
A پیمانه is a 200 ml cup. Spoon measures are level. Persian recipes are normally written in cups and spoons and that is what we show first; metric weights are one tap away for anyone who prefers to weigh.
Numbers we will not invent
If no source states a temperature, a time or a yield, we do not state one. A missing figure is more useful than a plausible one, because a plausible one cannot be checked. Nutrition is estimated for a stated serving and is labelled as an estimate; where it is unknown it is left blank, never shown as zero.
Safety comes before fidelity
There is one place we override the majority of sources: if a stated time or temperature would leave meat, dairy or preserved food undercooked, we do not reproduce it. Recipes here are cultural documentation, not tested kitchen instructions, and you should use your own judgement — but we will not print something we believe is unsafe.
What we do not claim
This is not an exhaustive record of every traditional food in every Iranian locality; the public official record is itself incomplete. Regional attribution says that sources associate a dish with a place or a community, never that it belongs to one. Around 540 records currently carry general guidance for their kind of dish rather than a method specific to them, and every one of those pages says so at the top of its method.
Corrections
Corrections are versioned rather than silently overwritten, and each page shows the release, the build and the corrections version it was made from. If something here is wrong, write to info@persian.restaurant and tell us — regional attribution in particular is contested, and we would rather be corrected than confident.