Behind the Steam July 2026

20 July 2026

We Didn’t Invent Caesar Salad — But This One Happened Here

We are planning a food calendar for 2027.

Twelve months. Twelve dishes. Twelve photographs from our kitchen, each connected to a full recipe on our website. And before we begin, we want to say something clearly:

We are not going to pretend we invented every dish.

Most recipes do not arrive in a kitchen untouched by history. They travel. They cross borders. They pass from restaurants to family tables, from books to handwritten notes, from one cook’s instinct to another’s. 

Sometimes we change them. We replace an ingredient because we cannot afford the original. We add something because it is waiting in the fridge. We remove something because we do not like it. We use a pan instead of a grill, a knife instead of a mandolin, or our hands instead of equipment we do not own.

Sometimes we change almost nothing. Because some recipes already know exactly what they are. That does not make the final plate meaningless or false.

A recipe can remain recognisable and still become part of our life.

What makes it ours is not a claim of invention. It is the day around it. The tiredness before cooking. The conversation while chopping. The substitutions. The mistakes. The tasting. The photograph. The argument about whether it needs more lemon. The plate eaten under the duvet after a difficult shift.

We do not own Caesar salad. But the Caesar salad we might make tonight will happen here. In our little station home. With leftover sourdough turned into croutons, chicken cooked in our pan, anchovies pressed into dressing, Parmesan grated by hand, and two people trying to write down measurements when they usually cook by instinct.

That story is ours. And that is what our calendar will hold.

“We cooked it here. We chose these ingredients. We changed this because it suited us. We kept that because it was already right. We ate it after this kind of day. This is what happened around the table.”

— by Elena & Atlas