On Thursday 31 March 2005 we organized a symposium entitled ‘Theory and Practice of Archaeological Residue Analysis.’ The participants were asked to prepare presentation on their own research, and to report on their analysis of a residue recently cooked in a new ceramic vessel. Eleven agreed to partake in the latter and were sent a segment of the wall of a vessel in which camel milk had been cooked. The accompanying letter and model report sheet did not provide information on what was prepared in the vessel, nor did it present a list of possibilities such as in Table 1. This made the analysis more challenging than is typical of most archaeological settings as the provenance, shape and date of a pot usually offer important clues to its former use and contents. Seven participants (almost 2/3) in this ‘Round robin’ managed to file a report before the meeting where the source of the residue was revealed. These individual reports will be briefly discussed here, preceded by some data on camel milk and followed by a discussion on the significance of our findings for the practice of archaeological residue analysis.