Dutch Cookbook
A Dutch home-cooking title painted in Delft blue — cobalt on tin-glaze, mapping the Low Countries by province, chapter and century.
The challenge
Dutch cooking has an image problem — written off as boiled and beige — and the sites that cover it don't help. But the real story is a painted archive: stamppot and herring and speculaas, and the rijsttafel that came home from the Indies. It deserved a title that looked as considered as the cuisine actually is, and pointedly not another warm-paper recipe blog.
The approach
We deliberately broke from the network's warm palette and built Delft Blue porcelain — cobalt on tin-glaze, a tile-wall home layout, toile hero art and a custom ossenkop ornament kit. No gilt, no warm paper. Under the paint it's the same chassis — statically rendered, province and era taxonomies, pantry references — and it raised the network's own bar with dynamic Delft-blue share images. The Indisch/colonial table is treated as its own province, not a footnote.
The result
Proof the chassis can wear a genuinely different face: a Dutch cuisine site that looks like a piece of porcelain and reads like an archive — 135 recipes mapped by province, chapter and century. Designed, built, and operated by us.