How to Use The Gastrographer

The row of pills above the map narrows the catalogue by kind: vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes, herbs, spices, stimulants, nuts and seeds. Below it, the box marked Choose ingredient from list opens the full set. Type into it to filter.

The filter matches regional names as well as the one the atlas happens to use, so garbanzo finds the chickpea, groundnut finds the peanut, and arugula finds the rocket. Each row shows the scientific name and how many stops the journey has.

On a phonethe pill row scrolls sideways. The two boxes stack instead of sitting side by side.

The second box, Search by recipe or country, is a different instrument. It looks up dishes by name and countries by name, alias, or historical region, so Ottoman Empire , Levant, and Persia all lead somewhere. Choosing a recipe opens its card; choosing a country opens a card listing every dish and every ingredient the atlas ties to it.

On a phoneresults open as a full-screen sheet rather than a dropdown, which gives the list room to breathe.

Each dot is a place the ingredient reached, and its colour says what happened there. The lines between them are the routes it actually travelled, drawn from the historical record rather than joined up for neatness.

• Ingredient originwhere the plant was first domesticated or gathered. It pulses, and there is usually only one.
• Became a culinary staplethe ingredient took root in the kitchen here and is still cooked with today.
• Trade or transit routeit passed through on its way somewhere else.
• Colonial or trade controla power took hold of the trade in it here.

Click any dot to open its card. Pan and zoom as you would any map.

Opening a dot gives you the date, the place, and an account of what the ingredient did there. Longer entries are trimmed with a Read more link. Where a dish belongs to that place, it appears as a small Recipe pill; pressing it opens the full recipe.

On a phonethe card is all you get, and it is enough. On a desktop, clicking a dot also moves the side panel to the matching entry in its Journey tab, so the map and the panel stay in step.

The bar along the bottom is the ingredient’s history end to end. Drag it and the map fills in as the centuries pass: dots appear only once the ingredient has reached them, so you watch the spread happen rather than seeing it all at once. Drag it back to the left to return to the beginning, or all the way right to see the finished journey.

The panel on the right carries the writing. Three tabs divide it: Story for the botany, the domestication, and the voyage; Lexicon for the etymology, the linguistic path, and the sources; and Journey for every stop in order, each opening the dishes attached to it.

The orange tab on its edge

The tab hanging off the panel’s left edge travels with the panel and controls its width. On a desktop there are three positions.

• With the panel closed, one tab sits against the right edge of the window. Press it to slide the panel in.
• With the panel open, a second tab appears above the first. The upper one closes the panel again.
• The lower one widens the panel to roughly double, for when you are reading rather than looking at the map. In that position only the upper tab remains, and it returns the panel to its usual width.

On a phonethere are two positions rather than three: closed, and open. The tab’s arrow flips to point the way it will send the panel. You can also tap the strip of visible map beside the panel to dismiss it.

Its buttons

• Copy link puts a link to the ingredient on your clipboard, ready to send to someone.
• Open the full story opens the whole entry as a plain, printable document, with the journey listed in full. On a desktop it arrives in a new tab; on a phone it replaces the map and offers a link back.
• The orange bar above the title hides the ingredient’s illustration and gives the height to the prose. Press it again to bring the picture back.

Recipes open over the map, from a journey point, from the search, or from the Also in row that links a dish to the other ingredients it depends on. Each card carries the cultural context first, then the ingredients and the method, and names the country it belongs to.

Serves rescales every quantity in the list when you press the plus or minus; a recipe with a fixed yield says Makes instead and does not scale. The metric and US toggle converts the ingredient amounts and the temperatures written into the method.

• Copy link copies a link straight to the recipe.
• Open in a new tab gives you the recipe as a clean document, keeping whatever serving count and units you had chosen.
• Print opens the same document and sends it to the printer, laid out for paper.

When the panel is closed, three pills sit in the corner of the map. Browse Ingredients and Browse Recipes open complete A to Z indexes, every ingredient with its scientific name and every dish the atlas holds. The third is this page.

On a phoneall of these live behind the ⋯ button in the top right, alongside What’s New, About, and Contact.