A recipe notebook that got out of hand.
The Plain Table is a small, independent cooking site run out of a kitchen on Madison's east side. We're not a brand. We're three people who cook a lot and write some of it down.
How it started
In the spring of 2020, like a lot of people, we were home and cooking three meals a day for the first time in years. Nora kept a battered spiral notebook by the stove — half grocery lists, half corrections to recipes that hadn't quite worked. "Too much liquid." "Forty minutes, not twenty-five." "Don't bother peeling them."
By the fall the notebook was full, and friends kept texting to ask how the beans had turned out so well, or what to do with a glut of late tomatoes. Typing the same answer out for the fifth time, it seemed easier to put it somewhere everyone could read it. The Plain Table went up that November with four recipes and a photo taken on a phone next to the kitchen window.
It has grown slowly and on purpose. We've never wanted it to be a content machine. We publish when we've cooked something worth passing along, and not before.
What we focus on
Seasonal home cooking, mostly. We live in Wisconsin, so our year is shaped by what the farmers' market actually has: asparagus and rhubarb in May, an avalanche of tomatoes and corn in August, root vegetables and squash from October until the ground freezes. We cook with that rhythm rather than fighting it.
The recipes lean toward the unfussy end of things — sheet-pan dinners, big pots of soup and beans, slow-roasted vegetables, the kind of baking you can do on a weeknight without a stand mixer. We're not against ambition; we just think most weeknights don't call for it. When a recipe does need real time or technique, we say so up front so you can decide.
What we try to avoid is filler. No fifteen-paragraph life story before the ingredients, no "you won't believe how easy," no recipe that needs a single specialty product you'll use once. If we can make something work with what's already in a normal kitchen, that's the version we publish.
The people behind it
Nora Brandt
Founder & main cook
Started the notebook, still does most of the cooking and most of the writing. Spent a decade in restaurant kitchens before deciding she preferred feeding people at home. Believes salt and patience fix nearly everything.
Daniel Okafor
Recipe tester
Cooks every recipe at least twice before it goes up — once exactly as written, once the way a tired person actually would. If a step is confusing or a timing is off, he's the reason it gets caught. Keeps a spreadsheet none of us are allowed to touch.
Ruth Halvorsen
Baking & preserves
Our contributor for everything that rises or gets sealed in a jar. Bakes sourdough on a schedule the rest of us can't keep up with, and turns the late-summer surplus into jam, pickles, and chutney. Writes the clearest instructions of any of us.
How we test recipes
Nothing goes up here on a single try. A recipe is cooked at least twice in a normal home kitchen — gas or electric, ordinary cookware, supermarket ingredients. The first pass follows the draft exactly so we can catch anything that doesn't work as written. The second is cooked the way a real, slightly distracted person would, to find the steps that are easy to misread or skip.
We weigh flour and other baking ingredients in grams and give cup measures alongside them, because a "cup of flour" can swing by forty percent depending on how it's scooped. For everything else we test with standard measuring spoons and cups so the recipe matches what's in your drawer.
We note the things that actually trip people up: the pan size that matters, the point where it's easy to walk away too soon, the substitution that works and the one that doesn't. When we can't test a substitution ourselves, we say we haven't rather than guess. If a recipe gets a correction after publishing, we update it and add a dated note at the bottom rather than quietly editing it.