A race weekend cookbook and Formula 1 archive
Travel the Formula 1 calendar from your own kitchen. Search any driver, circuit, country or race since 1950, then bring that place to your table. No passport required, though an apron helps.
Where it began
Every race, a seat at our table.
For almost a decade, my mom and I have kept one tradition. Wherever Formula 1 races that weekend, that is where dinner comes from. Melbourne sends us to the Australian coast. Suzuka brings Japan into our kitchen. Monza means Italy, and a very long lunch.
What began as a way to watch together became the best part of our week. A country we have never visited. An ingredient we have never bought. An hour side by side at the stove before the lights go out. Somewhere between the first course and the checkered flag, it stopped being dinner and became ours.
For years we joked that it should be a cookbook. Now we are writing it, together, one race at a time.
Podium Plates is more than a book to us. It is a reason to keep building something side by side, to keep learning the places we have only seen on a screen, and to follow this sport a little closer with every season. Support it, and you are not only backing a cookbook. You are pulling up a chair at our table, and coming along for whatever comes next.
Every contribution goes toward researching, writing and printing the first edition.
Our tradition
Every round opens a new country to taste. In our house, the formation lap doubles as the dinner bell.
The race weekend ritual
Find out where the race is, what surrounds the circuit, and what the locals eat when nobody is filming.
Pick something that belongs to that place. If you cannot pronounce it yet, even better.
Sit down together. The meal is the reason, the company is the reward, and the leftovers are the bonus.
Lights out, plate in hand. Years later, one bite will bring the whole race back, including the parts you would rather forget.
Next round, a new country. By the finale you have eaten your way around the world without queuing at a single airport.
The first cookbook
One chapter for every round of the season. Each one carries you to the host city and home again, with dishes made for an ordinary kitchen and stories worth telling over them.
One thousand copies, numbered and signed by hand. Five hundred hardback, five hundred paperback, and a digital edition for everyone else.
Plus shipping and handling. Printed copies come to us first to be numbered and signed, then travel on to you.
Coming soonPlaceholder artwork. The final cover is still being designed.
A taste of the book
Australia · Signature recipe
Crisp skin, lemon myrtle butter, charred greens and roasted lemon. Ready before the formation lap, with time left to find the remote.
How we make it
Every dish belongs to the place the race visits, and we research it in the culture it comes from. When a recipe is our own take, we say so, rather than inventing a grandmother we never had.
Every recipe is written so a first time cook can follow it from the chopping board to the plate, with swaps for hard to find ingredients and versions for every kind of diet.
Dates, results and history are checked against more than one source before they reach a page. The stewards would approve.
We are fans of food and racing. Podium Plates is not connected to Formula 1, the FIA or any team, though we would happily feed all three.
Australia, China and Japan are written. The rest of the season is being researched now.
Be part of it
One thousand numbered and signed copies, from $49.99, and a digital edition at $19.99. Leave your email and you will hear the moment orders open, well before the lights go out.
See the editionsPull up a chair with our community of cooks and race fans, and unlock the whole archive back to 1950, for $3 a month.
Join at $3 and keep that price for as long as you keep your seat. Cancel anytime.
A yearly seat, $99 a year. Everything above, plus each new Podium Plates cookbook sent to you every year, with early access before anyone else. Coming soon
Help a mother and son turn a family tradition into a book worth keeping. Every contribution goes toward researching each chapter and printing the first edition.
Support is not a preorder or a donation, and is not tax deductible.
Questions
Our first cookbook, limited to one thousand printed copies: five hundred hardback at $79.99 and five hundred paperback at $49.99, plus shipping. Every printed copy is numbered and signed by both of us, so it comes to us first and then travels on to you, which takes a little longer than an ordinary parcel. The digital edition, at $19.99, is unlimited.
We are writing it now, one chapter per race weekend, which is roughly the pace of the sport itself. Join the list above and you will hear first when orders open.
The Podium Table is our community of cooks and race fans, and a seat is $3 a month. It opens every season back to 1950, with its story and full results, every recipe with its swaps, dietary versions and shopping list, and every result for every search. Join at $3 and you keep that price for as long as you stay. A yearly seat, coming soon at $99, adds each new cookbook sent to you every year, with early access.
Something from everything. Every season has its calendar, its winners and the opening of its story; every race has its top five; every driver, circuit, country and team has its profile; and every country has a signature recipe. The last five seasons and five landmark years are free in full. A seat at The Podium Table adds the rest.
Not at all. The calendar is simply our excuse to travel by plate. Every recipe works perfectly well on a Tuesday, no safety car required.
The archive is built from Wikidata, a free public database, and checked against the season and race results published on Wikipedia. Every page shows what it was checked against.
No. Podium Plates is an independent, unofficial cookbook made by a mother and son. It is not associated with Formula 1, the FIA or any team. We simply cook, very enthusiastically, in their direction.
Start with this weekend's Grand Prix, or wander any season since 1950. Bring an appetite; we will bring the history.
Canada · Sweet finish
Three layers that never see an oven: a chocolate, coconut and nut crumb base, a thick vanilla custard buttercream, and a thin snap of dark chocolate on top.
The Nanaimo bar takes its name from a harbor city on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and its family tree is gloriously untidy. Recipes for an unbaked chocolate square were circulating in Canadian community cookbooks by the early 1950s, including three in a 1952 cookbook from the women's auxiliary of the Nanaimo hospital. The name Nanaimo bar first appeared in print in Vancouver in 1953, and the same square was published that year as the London Fog bar, which is how Canada came to have two famous London Fogs, only one of them a drink.
The layers are simple: a crumb base bound with butter, cocoa and egg, a pale yellow middle of butter, icing sugar and custard powder, and a thin top of melted chocolate. The City of Nanaimo adopted an official recipe after a contest in the 1980s, won by a resident named Joyce Hardcastle, and the bar has since appeared on a Canadian postage stamp and at a White House state dinner. There is no baking, only melting, pressing and chilling, which makes it a fine job for the day before the Canadian Grand Prix. The only real skill is the patience to let each layer set before the next one goes on.