PERMISSION TO WRITE ALL OVER YOUR COOKBOOKS.
How scribbling in the margins of your recipe books will make you a better cook.
Add notes, change ingredients, cross things out, alter the cooking times. One way to be a better cook is to make your cookbooks work harder. Tick the good recipes and X the bad ones.
What? Deface a beautiful book that you were given for Christmas, or that cost you a good $50? Yep. Obviously NOT library books or Other People’s books, but if it’s yours, this is how to make it really yours.
A cook book is a tool, not a single and irreplaceable work of art. It is printed by the thousands to help us upgrade our skills and get a nice dinner on the table. If you don’t document your little additions and changes, you’re basically ground-hogging the same recipe each time you make it.
You’re not learning anything (unless you’re one of those miraculous people who can remember everything they ever did without writing it down, in which case, I bow low).
In literary terms, this is known as marginalia, or notes written in the margins of books. Authors from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde did it constantly, to help them reason, think and remember. Even our grandmas and great-grandmas handed down their ragged, stained, much-used cookbooks to us, because they knew the accumulated wisdom inside was just that – wisdom.
The first time isn’t easy. I had to progress through a few years of sticky notes to get to where I am today, without feeling as guilty as a schoolgirl drawing hearts in an encyclopaedia. But you get over it when you come across one of your scribbles or corrections and think ‘thank heavens I wrote that down’.
Now I pick up a cook book and a pen at the same time. I like the deeper level of engagement and commitment it brings, and the sense of ownership. And knowing that my chicken tortilla soup needs jalapenos.
Last Christmas, I was given a copy of the Willaura & District Kindergarten Cook Book, a compilation of country recipes contributed by the good cooks of Willaura and surrounds, southwest of Ararat in Western Victoria.
That was good in itself, but the best thing about it was the person who gave it to me did a wonderful thing. She went through her own copy and transcribed many of her own, hard-won notes and tips into my copy (thank you, Deb).
So I know that the recipe for Yo-Yo Biscuits is ‘close to perfect’ but also not to make them too thick, and that I can whip together the Whole Orange Cake in four minutes flat. It has given the book a whole extra layer of meaning, and a connection with those who have cooked these dishes before me.
Now, when I have it open on the kitchen bench, I have a pen with me as well, to make my own notes. Apart from the fact that they’re damn handy, I think of them as marks of respect.
Thanks for subscribing! Share if it strikes a chord with someone you know, or leave a comment. Copyright © 2020 Jill Dupleix. All rights reserved. I live and work on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging.