Personalized Cookbooks

[lydamorehouse]

 I have a HUGE collection of cook books at home because Shawn is very fond of collecting them both for ourselves and, as it happens, for the Minnesota Historical Society where she works. Most of them are interesting for a variety of different reasons, but every once and a while we come a cross a real TREASURE.

Shawn picked up a bunch of cook books that no one wanted off the Buy Nothing Facebook group. In amongst those, we found this self-bound book. Initially, it looked like someone had just gotten industrious and organized with their clipping collection. But, the further I looked into it, the more I found to love.

When I hit the mimeographed section, I knew I'd found some real gold.


Image: mimeographed story of wrestling the recipe from Grandma Pratt

The recipe itself is just some kind of banana bread, but I love that the person who copied it down felt the keen desire to leave behind the story of how [bleeping] hard someone had to work to get Grandma Pratt to cough up the recipe in any real useable form because, of course, she made the recipe by feel and used "Oh, just a pinch of that and a pinch of this."  

I LOVE this as an annotation because it reminds me of the time I tried to learn how to make injera. I took a Zoom cooking class through Community Ed and the woman who taught the class said that she felt that the only person to teach this class was her grandmother who spoke very little English as they were all fairly recent immigrants from Somalia. Grandma was great!  But, her recipe advice consisted of holding up a handful of flour to the camera and saying, "Like this." We were all begging in the chat for measurements, but grandma HAD NO MEASURING CUPS. The best she could do for us was pour her handful into her tea cup and say, "Like this."

I just stopped taking notes and enjoyed watching them make the food.

The other amazing piece I found was also from the mimeographed section:


This woman's Sloppy Joe recipe admits: "I sort of make it up."

I mean, don't we all?

This whole book is full of this sort of things coupled with bits of the life story of Bea (we found her name on one of the 1978 Minnesota Agriculture Extension Program newsletters) and Art (the husband, I presume, who signed his name to a cooking chemistry test which they also saved for some reason.) Bea was very concerned at the time this cookbook was put together about losing weight, for herself, perhaps, or for Art. There are a ton of "how to count calories" advice columns and, of course, low-fat recipes. 

The saddest bit was a whole article about foods for dementia. She had clearly read the article many times and underlined various bits. All I can say at this point is, I hope it helped, Bea. Or at least gave you comfort that you tried to do something. I mean, at least the advice included exercise, which is almost NEVER bad advice. 

So, question: do you write in your cookbooks? I think most of us do to some extent, but I need to start being cleverer. I mean, I want someone, some day to notice my weird little annotations.

Comments

[mtbc]

I don't write in them at all! Sometimes I modify recipes or whatever but then I make separate note on my computer.

[lydamorehouse]

Interesting! My next question is: how did you learn to cook?

Because I also did not collect (or write in) cookbooks until really recently, but the only food that I used to make I learned under the watchful eye of my mother. Like, I can still make the first recipe ("Chicken Curry in a Hurry" from a heart smart cookbook from the 70s, so not very authentically Indian...) by heart. We also have a computer file of these sorts of recipes, but even our computer files get printed out and written on.

I guess I have a terrible memory and need to write it out??

[mtbc]

Watching my mother when I was a kid was more helpful than I realized at the time: I learned how things are meant to look at various intermediate stages. I also did a brief cooking course at the end of high school, first time I got to do things like deal with a whole raw chicken. I like cookery shows but at college I mostly cooked by trial and error from cookery books. For instance, with toffee for coating cookies, I started with a thermometer and eventually just learned that the bubbles look different. When I try new recipes, they don't usually come out correctly but the results are still usually palatable enough that that's okay.

I still have most of the cookbooks I had back in college years ago. (Some I left with mst3kmoxie, my first wife.) It's really cookbooks and recipes I find online that I cook by. Where I do my own modifications, I write things out separately in files on my computer then cook from those.

On memory, with things I make repeatedly, I'll typically vary the quantities in order to simplify the recipe. Good guidance for the sensitivity can be to see how the quantities vary in similar recipes from different sources. The only ones I remember, are the ones I've simplified and used much. For instance, whatever the official crepe recipes might be, I've simplified that to, an egg and a couple of teaspoons of oil per person, 100g of flour per egg, three times as much milk as flour. I try to make it all easy ratios otherwise, if I went a while without making it, I'd forget. Similarly https://mtbc.dreamwidth.org/331341.html is a bit numerically simpler than the recipes from which I derived it.

[lydamorehouse]

This is interesting, thanks for the really long reply. It seems to me that the people who don't write in cookbooks may be more intuitive about cooking and/or learned by watching/listening from someone.

As I mention in other comments, I came to cooking much, much later in life. Quite intentionally, I refused to learn to cook from my elders because I was against anything seen as traditionally feminine. (I now regret this to some degree.) When my wife and I were first together in college, we mostly subsisted on things that could be made easily from a package. We discovered, of course, that it was actually cheaper (and often, once I'd learned how to make things, better) to buy the ingredients and home make a lot of the things we used to buy pre-made in packages. (This is not universally true. Brownies from scratch take ten times as long and taste EXACTLY the same as the ones from the box.)

For me, a lot of my cooking is trying someone else's recipe with no real idea what I'll get and then figuring out how I would make it--hence all the notations on the various recipes. I mean, I am at a point now where I am much more confident I know what things will be like before I cook them, but there was a time when I was like, "Whelp, here goes!"

I also have to wonder if your ability to do things with ratio and quantity comes with how dry ingredients are measured elsewhere in the world. Quarts and cups and whatnot are still confusing to me, despite having grown up with all of these measurements my whole life. I think we'd be better off here in the US if we also used grams and whatnot for our dry ingredients instead of cups, etc.

[mtbc]

That makes a lot of sense. Yes, not only was my mother routinely cooking from scratch (even fries would start from the raw potatoes) but she too watched cooking shows and of course I was often in the room at the time. At college I attempted only simple recipes, like toad in the hole, or shortbread, but they were still useful experiences.

I do simplify the volumes too but I'm old enough to be used to working with Imperial measures, my parents didn't grow up with metric, so I am okay with confusing units. After all, I first knew my own weight in stones and for breakfast I may use around ½ cup oatmeal and add around ⅞ cups milk. (-: But, pre-metric, the UK mostly used pints and fl oz, not so much the cups and such so common in the US, so first I had to learn what those even are. My main risk with those is more that, when using a recipe book, I have to remember where it's from: I have my sixth transatlantic move coming up soon and a British pint has twenty fl oz in it (so the quarts adjust similarly), at least the weights are the same. (The fl oz are a slightly different size too but negligibly so for anything I make.)

[naomikritzer]

Ed and I write in all our cookbooks, and always have -- extensive, detailed annotations for most of our favorite recipes, as we improve on them and change up ingredients. My red bell pepper pasta recipe includes a note from me that you should do it in the following order: (1) put the water on the boil; (2) start the peppers roasting; (3) make the sauce; (4) grate the cheese. (At some point I started buying pre-grated cheese for this, but the note remains.) We cross out stuff we don't use. We cross out "optional" next to things we ALWAYS use. We make notes on how long things actually take (frequently more time than the recipe-writer thought), whether we need to increase ingredients to have enough, if there's a particularly good side dish to make with it.

[lydamorehouse]

I'm thinking about this more, especially since you asked me about my first cookbook... and I learned to cook only a few things from my mother. I have the one that I really remember, and then a lot of my earliest days as a self-cook, I would just honestly open a package of this or a package of that. In our first year out of college, Shawn and I ate a lot of pre-prepared meals, like chicken Kiev, etc. And, I don't think there was anything wrong with that? I kept us fed?

I'm wondering if some of the folks on this comment thread who don't write in cookbooks learned to cook more from their families? Both my mother and my grandmother were home cooks and cooked most of our meals from scratch, but I just wasn't part of that for a long time and kind of refused to learn on account of thinking that made me a more liberated woman.

So, when I did go back to home cooking from scratch it was much, much later in life and so I needed the recipe books in order to even BEGIN.

[sabotabby]

Incredible.

I do not own many cookbooks but the ones I have are nice and I don't write in them.

[lydamorehouse]

And that is very reasonable.

We have several cookbooks that I consider artifacts and therefore I will NEVER write in them. Some have recipes I use a lot! I think it's just about how you view cookbooks. Are they books? Are they tools? Are they artifacts? Are they something else entirely?

I don't think that there is one right answer to this question! I've used cookbooks in ALL of these ways. There are several that I legit read for pleasure, like I would a fiction book (which I would never, ever write in!)

This is why I asked. I really think the answer is as interesting as it is myriad.

[yhlee]

I'm not sure my grandma ever set eyes on measuring implements, and my mom only did after she moved to the USA, and only for baking. My mom doesn't consider it to be "real cooking" if you have to *gasp* follow a recipe. XD

[lydamorehouse]

Yes. There is no doubt in my mind that there's something about this that is, I suspect, regional and ethnic. Like, I bet that if I had been more interested in learning to make kolachi from my Czech grandmother, there would have been no recipe only "sit here and watch" the first six times, followed by "now you make this part" until I'd learned to do it all without a recipe.

But, I feel like there are parts of the US where learning to cook like this is just the expected way to learn as well? I may be wrong about this, not having really lived much outside of the Midwest, but it feels generally "Southern" to me to have learned to cook without a recipe? I don't know. I think you've lived in a lot more Southern states than I have, so maybe you have a more informed opinion about this.

As I told Naomi above, I learned to cook from several different methods. I did not have a recipe book much at all until I was well into adulthood. Shawn had learned to cook only basic things after her mother died, most of which she will freely admit came out of a can or a box, and we subsisted that way together out of college. But, I HAD a few things taught to me that were passed down without a recipe and I felt confident enough about it all to have gone to a cafe and come home and decided that I could just MAKE "Number 9 with cheese" on my own. From there, I picked up recipes, etc.

I think this fascinates me because EVERYONE has to feed themselves every day, somehow. And we all do it our own way, you know?

[oracne]

I don't write much in my cookbooks, but now I am inspired to write more.

[lydamorehouse]

Right??? You want some future person like me to be enamored of your witty repartee!

[minnehaha]

I annotate my favorite recipes by turning to them, getting some schmeer on the page, and thence finding it easily thereafter. Best recipes are quite a mess. I also transcribe them into a separate hand-illustrated volume called "My Best Recipes, saved for Posterity."

K.

[lydamorehouse]

Oh, I bet the illustrated volume is AMAZING!!! What a gift to posterity!

My cookbooks are also a mess. If I love something, the page is spattered.

[lcohen]

my cookbooks are filled with notes on post-it notes or the backs of envelopes, especially when i am working on developing my own recipe but using the one in the cookbook as a base. as an example, i have a baseline chili recipe that originated as a recipe in a chili cookbook--i made the recipe the way it is in the cookbook exactly once and then i wanted to adapt it into something with more ingredients so i made notes about my additions of sauce and increases of spices (for flavor, not heat) to cover the additional ingredients. i would adapt that recipe to the person or group for whom i was cooking. this all culminated in my developing a chili that my then girlfriend and her sister, who were triathletes, used as training food--it had five different kinds of proteins in it. or my ratatouille recipe which takes elements from two different recipes so i made notes next to one recipe of the things i incorporated from the other so that i didn't have to flip back and forth.

if i print a recipe out from the internet then i feel free to write directly on it, but a cookbook, even if it has spatters of food on it, is a book and i don't tend to write in books.

[lydamorehouse]

Huh. I am getting the sense that a lot of folks here consider cookbooks BOOKS and not tools. Naomi and I, who both have professor parents, see books as something you can absolutely write in when you are working from them. My father actually hates electronic books because he can not write in them and if he's reading, it's almost always so that he can reference whatever it is in a lecture or paper.

I grew up around writing in books as OK.

So, I find this whole "you must not writing in books because they are BOOKS" to be very different than what I'm used to. However, I know enough book people that I don't find it WEIRD, I just find it interesting that y'all classify cookbooks with the same reverence as fiction books.

[lcohen]

well i hope that none of my fiction books have splashes of tomato sauce in them so not QUITE the same reverence. :)

my mom had tons and tons of cookbooks, many of which i inherited, yet i have no recollections of her referring to cookbooks when i watched her cook--in fact for recipes i wanted, i have memories of sitting on her kitchen stairs and taking notes while she narrated as she made a favorite dish that i hoped to replicate. sometimes she'd look at a recipe card for a recipe for something she made very seldom but mostly she improvised and never made anything the same way twice.

my first wife thought i was a terrible cook (self-fulfilling prophecy) so didn't cook anything but scrambled eggs for 14 years. lacking that confidence that my mom had, i do start with a recipe, but i think i aspire to improv, i just write the script as i go. i think part of not writing in the book is that i don't think that i'm writing the final version--i think if i thought that this change i am making is the final change, i might write in the book but if you could see the mess of envelopes and notes--if it were all scrunched into the available writing space in the book, it would be illegible and unusable.

[lydamorehouse]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Some of my notes are simple: "NOT GOOD" for instance. So, there's plenty of room for that. :-)

It sounds like another factor in all of this is how one learned to cook. As discussed extensively above, I had a chance to do what you did--follow my elders around and take notes--but I intentionally refused because I did NOT want to learn something so obviously "women's work." (Obviously wrongheaded, but you can't tell that to Teen!Lyda who was very fierce about her feminism. I was, in fact, voted "Biggest Women's Libber" at my high school my senior year, so there's THAT.) Anyway, some of the others in the comments who took the time to learn to cook this way do not seem to need to write in cookbooks, which is absolutely fine! It seems like there's a bunch of factors that go into whether or not you annotate recipes or not (or whether you recopy them, etc., which a lot of other people also seem to do.)

[carbonel]

I have a bunch of cookbooks, but in the past decade or so I've found myself mostly using recipes off of the Internet. If I make them more than once, I'll put them in a file creatively named recipes.doc (you can tell it's been around a while because it doesn't have the .docx extension). And I'll annotate any modifications there.

Also -- would it be too pedantic of me to point out that the recipe books you said were mimeo'd were actually ditto copies? The giveaway is the purple ink; mimeo ink is almost always black. And ditto is the one that has that characteristic smell, for anyone whose memories go back that far.

[lydamorehouse]

A little bit, but I'll forgive you. I am, in point of fact, old enough to remember the smell of mimeograph, so I suppose I should have known better.

It seems like you are in the majority in terms of how recipes get used. Lots of people seem to be making their own personal electronic files. Shawn and I do too? It's just that we ALSO write in our cookbooks.

[applenym]

I've had trouble getting over the feeling that writing in any book, even a cookbook, is doing a Bad Thing. Maybe I got yelled at too many times about not dog-earing the pages of a book, and not laying it open face down because it would crack the spine, and etc. And extrapolated from there that books are like unto holy relics and must be treated as such.

I save most of my recipes in the Paprika app these days, anyway. And I annotate them a lot! So I suppose I am sort of "writing in the margins" of my electronic cookbook? My old iPad lives in my kitchen because I mostly use it to cook from more than anything.

I do also love and collect hard copy cookbooks, but often because I admire their clever typesetting/layout and book design. Cookbooks today are often beautiful works of art.