Culinary culture refers to the values, traditions, practices and beliefs of a community that shape the ways in which its members cook and eat. Cookbooks, as collections of recipes, represent an ideal source of information on culinary cultures – how and when food is sourced, prepared, cooked and eaten, and the values attributed to particular foods – but they can also lead to wrong conclusions. Fortunately, researchers have at their disposition a diverse range of written resources, including fiction and popular media, to complement the interpretation of cookbooks.