On Wednesday, The New York Times published a fabulous story about the value of hand-written notes in the margins of cook books. In case you missed it, you can read it here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/dining/cookbooks-echo-with-the-wisdom-of-chefs-past.html?ref=dining&_r=0
I take this one step further, collecting hand-written recipes, whether they be written in composition notebooks, above, or on cards, at bottom. And some of the hand-written recipes I collect even have "margin notes," as this one for sausage cake which has a big X through it and the notation: no like.
Oh yes -- I write in my cookbooks and I love your blog!
ReplyDeleteMaking notes is how I keep track of what I like about a recipe, what I might do differently next time, if there's going to be a next time. I make notes in the margins of my cookbooks, scrawl all over my own handwritten recipes and type in notes on my electronic recipes. "Document, document, document" as they say.
ReplyDeleteI liked that NYT article! And I too write in cookbooks and like to see what other people have written. It's only natural. A recipe is always going to be more than half a cup of this and a pinch of that; recipes mean food, which ultimately means family and friends, which ultimately means memories greater than the sum of the recipe's parts.
ReplyDeleteI write in them all the time and date my notes to. SInce I'm often changing the recipe it helps me remember what I did, or if the original recipe was worth making again.
ReplyDeleteI write in my cookbooks all the time. I do all the stuff that Mrs. Ed does. That way I'll know if it sucked or not! :)
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