About this site

About

A working atlas of the world's cooking, one culinary region at a time, for people who want to understand a cuisine rather than collect its recipes.

Last changed 5 September 2026

What this is

Not Just Stew is an atlas of the world's cooking. Each culinary region is taken seriously as a subject: where its food came from, what shaped it, what its internal logic is, and how to cook it properly. Every dish is given as the tradition built it, then with the changes a modern chef would make and the reasoning behind each one. Quantities and timings come from inside the tradition, and where a dish does not yet carry them it is a method to read, not a recipe to scale; we are adding them volume by volume, lead dishes first. It is not a recipe index and it is not a list of national dishes. It is the book you would want before you cooked a cuisine for the first time, and the one you would go back to once you had.

The argument

Two ideas run through every volume. The first is that a cuisine is a food world defined by ecology, trade, religion and empire, in that order of force, and not by a border. So the atlas is organised by culinary region rather than by country: the savanna and the forest belt of West Africa are different food worlds that happen to share flags, and the Mediterranean behaves as one food world that happens to have many. The second is that every restaurant technique in these cuisines has an indigenous ancestor. Elevating this food is a matter of doing traditional things deliberately, not of importing French method. The modern versions here are built on that principle.

Who it is for

It began as one home cook's attempt to understand cuisines he loved and found badly documented in English, and the atlas is still written for that reader: someone technically capable, with a good kitchen, who wants restaurant level flavour at home and wants to understand what they are cooking rather than be flattered. It is also written for the reader who grew up eating this food and wants to see it treated with the seriousness it deserves, for the person who has never really cooked and wants a way in that does not talk down to them, and for anyone teaching food or food history who needs sources they can follow.

Africa first

The atlas started with Africa and Africa remains its priority, because that is where the gap between how good the food is and how well it is documented in English is widest. Twenty one African volumes were written before any other region began. The atlas has since grown to cover Asia, Europe, the Americas and Oceania and the Pacific, one culinary region at a time rather than a whole continent at once, and every region is held to the same rules.

How it is made

The research rule that decides whether any of this is worth anything is local sources first: writers, cooks, scholars and press from inside each tradition before anyone writing about it from outside, searched in the language of the place. Every chapter ends with the claims it checked and could not stand behind, named rather than quietly dropped. The full set of rules is on the page How we research. The dish photographs are placeholders generated to a consistent brief and are being replaced with real photographs as the dishes are cooked.

Where it stands, and where it is going

Today, reading the atlas needs no account: everything here is free to read, and the record you build as you go, the dishes you save, cook and note, lives in your own browser. Sign in with an emailed link and that record follows you between kitchen and sofa and phone, and you can take part: report what you cooked and how it went, correct what we got wrong, and be counted among the people cooking their way through the same book. Comments and a community around the cooking are still to come. The atlas will also need to pay for itself, and it will do that openly, saying what is paid for and by whom. What will not change is the standard of the work: sourced from inside the tradition, honest about what it does not know, and written for people who want to understand what they cook.

The name

The working title was Hidden Cuisines, which is kept as the strapline. Not Just Stew is what the atlas is for: the cuisines that get reduced, in most English language writing, to a single dish and a paragraph, given the whole book they deserve.

Who publishes it

Not Just Stew is published by Stewart Honeyman, a home cook in Britain. Corrections, especially from inside a tradition, are the most valuable thing the site receives: the link is on every volume and dish.