Making Food History.

Recipe books flourish, but they grow best in a strange compost of food history. Most recipe writers google any unusual ingredient that they mention, and now the vast majority of those Google answers replicate information from the "The Oxford Companion to Food" by Alan Davidson and edited by Tom Jaine. Jaine discovered "Companion" when he used Google to double-check some of the original research or expand on it. His revisions turned into a comedy of sorts because now the Davidson research has become the last word. Although all historical research is a bit circular, there was such a vacuum in reliable food scholarship before 1999 that can now sense the point of which the circle began.
References
Field, M. (2007). Making Food History. Gastronomica, 7(1), 20-24. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.