Obviously, anything found on the internet should be taken with a peck o' salt. But conventional (print) food history is full of purloined misinformation as well. While researching an herb I'd heard of (butnege) I found only three references in print -- all three were, word for word, identical. None contained any worthwhile info, and none cited their source. A letter from Paula Wolfert was the only thing that led to a decent answer (turned out that "butnege" was nothing more than dried mint -- something that none of the printed sources seemed to know).
