If you're like me, somewhere in your house is a box or binder filled with recipe cards. I love mine. They are in my handwriting, but also in the looping script of my mother and the chicken scratch of my granny.
When I moved into my first place, my mother started transferring recipes from our family to new cards. Eventually, I also received many of the originals. Meaning I have duplicates, but even those are a little different, like the slight variations in my granny's apple crisp recipe and my mom's version of the very same recipe, attributed by her to Granny. They are more than recipes, they are heirlooms. They are remembrances. You can see history on a recipe card. It's not just how the ingredients change through time, or the way they are structured, you can see which recipes were loved by the stains that ring the edges of cards. The memories of spilled ingredients, the charring from a space a little too close to the stove. Each card is a way to have a conversation with someone distant or no longer with us. Picking up my granny's matzo ball recipe before Pesach begins is a way to talk to her through time and space. Food is, after all, love and recipes are love letters.
So, yes, I love these cards. But they aren't very practical. First of all, I lose them. I put them down and set a bowl on them and poof. They turn up eventually, but usually not when I need them. Secondly, they leave no room for amendments. The space on a notecard is limited and, if you want to make yourself a note (don't forget to separate the eggs, lady!) or a helpful hint (check at 15 minutes!!) you may find yourself winding those words through the vanishingly small writable space left. I want to amend these and add to them! That matzo ball recipe? It calls for rendered chicken fat. While I have rendered my own chicken fat (humble brag) I don't necessarily want to. So I may want to make a note of the grocery store in town with some in the freezer case. Or I may want to write in a replacement ratio of oil if someone in the future doesn't want to bother. Enter the recipe notebook.
There are obvious benefits to a notebook over cards, but the one that puts it over the top for me every time is simply space. I devote one page, front and back, to every recipe. That means that I can draw myself a reminder of the pattern of the four strand challah braid on the reverse of my favorite challah recipe. That space is luxurious, so much room for whatever I want. I could fit a poem to every recipe in there and still have room for an incidental note about how I never make enough tomato sauce for a lasagna and to get it together already.
In my notebook, all of my most used recipes stay bound together, unlikely to be lost and it's difficult to hide and escape under a bowl. It fits on a bookshelf seamlessly and you can plop it anywhere. Plus, who doesn't have roughly infinity blank notebooks floating around their space? Mine is a notebook from a conference I attended. I covered the front with black duct tape to make it more durable and also cover up the conference logo (sorry not sorry, conference hosts.)
Sorry Mom. Sorry Granny. I've gone full recipe notebook. I will never give up those cards, but I'll probably end up with my own version of the apple crisp recipe in these pages.
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