About Dumas Family Recipes

Cooking has been handed down in our family for generations, one cook teaching the next at the stove. The recipes traveled the same way, on index cards, in notebooks, and in the heads of the people who made them most.

The family has since spread out, and our kitchens are now a long way apart. Cooking is still one of the things that brings us together, and this collection is how we keep doing it from wherever we are.

This is a curated collection, not an archive. Some recipes are the family’s own; others started with another cook, and those are credited by name on their pages and marked as adapted where we’ve changed them.

Where a recipe came from matters less than whether it earns its place. Everything here is something the family enjoys, and it’s here because it works in an ordinary home kitchen, not because it looked good somewhere.

For anyone else who cooks from this site, the aim is to make it easy to put a good home-cooked meal on the table, without wading through walls of text to find what you came for. That’s why the recipe sits near the top of the page.

Quantities scale to the number of people you’re feeding, and they round to amounts a real measuring cup or spoon can hold: 1½ tablespoons, never 0.1 cup. Baked goods scale in whole batches, because you can’t bake a fifth of a loaf.

Every ingredient goes by one name across the site. A search for scallions finds every recipe that uses them, whatever the original called them.

At the foot of each recipe, “Serve with” suggests what to make alongside it. Those pairings are chosen by hand, one recipe at a time, because what goes with a dish is a judgment, not something a shared ingredient can tell you.

The full list is on the homepage. If you want somewhere to start, try a family favorite: Bacon & Feta Stuffed Chicken with Rosemary Butter, with Classic Baked Potatoes on the side. Each one’s “Serve with” points to the other.