Our taste memories are so eloquent, like pieces of music that can conjure up a moment in such detail and clarity that we feel we just have to go there again somehow. For food, the "somehow" involves finding the recipe. Before I relate some of the most recent recipe requests, let me tell you how I go about recipe searches.

First, I need to know about the dish: what did it taste like, look like, what was the texture, what other dish did it resemble, where was it first sampled, in what time period and so on.

The search involves a check of The Advertiser's microfiche and electronic libraries (the electronic library only goes back to 1995), a call to a restaurant or hotel, paging through The Advertiser's cookbook collection and my own, e-mails to some of my foodie and chef friends. And I hit a search engine or two — usually www.Google.com — and some particular Web sites to see if it's online. (Home recipes often are, as well as historical restaurant recipes.)

Generally, I specialize in home recipes. Two reasons: Restaurant recipes are hard to get, even if the restaurant is still in business. And when you get them, they often don't work at home because home cooks lack the equipment, the ingredients and sometimes the skill to reproduce them. Also, chefs are notoriously bad recipe writers. So much of their knowledge is in their heads, and the heads of their workers.

So what's on the list this week?