A cook’s shorthand will strike the observer either as an intriguing glimpse into someone’s mind, or as a gratuitous one. It really is peculiar how useful such notes are to the author, but how useless they may seem to anyone else. Until, that is, the author fills in the blanks, should an opportunity arise. If one does—say, because you ask me for a recipe—I might point you to some image below and talk you through the steps. More likely, you’ll benefit indirectly, maybe as you help yourself to a slice of something that attained its potential only because I could access my recipe.
Most of the time, when I cook, the instructions are in my head. Simple proportions—how much water to how much rice, what amount of tahini to what amount of chickpeas—are as vivid in my mind as my family’s street address in 1985 or my dead dad’s old mobile number. More complex arcana (ingredients and instructions for making, say, leniwe, pesto, moong dal, gari, socca, or congee) are also usually a matter of habit and muscle memory. If either fails, there’s always common sense, and it tends to suffice. This is how devotion manifests: no reminders necessary.
The exception? Baking, generally. With chemistry so finely tuned (especially where yeast, sodium bicarbonate or baking powder are involved), much less can be accomplished by feel. Add in the alchemy that occurs in the oven and the careening disproportions at play, and you wind up needing a cheat sheet. Even salt and sugar can’t usually be added to taste, unless you’re into sampling raw, formless things that might make you sick. Nor can salt, sugar, and many spices be eyeballed—at least not if you’re after consistency.
Why not use cookbooks, like everybody else? Oh I do! I read them voraciously, like novels, or I approach them piecemeal. Same goes for content available online and my favorite cooking blogs (I especially love what Deb and David have to say). But I am a researcher and a tinkerer, and, most importantly, I am a streamliner. So I tweak and I zag and usually I have half a mind to write it down when I do, so that I can assess the results and know how to refine things the next time, provided there is one at all.
Thus, when I bake, I jot things down. Hastily, because I’m so immersed in the baking. Ingredients and amounts. Weights in grams, usually. Afterwards, I either have the building blocks of a recipe, or I have the groundwork for my next hypothesis. Notes might layer upon notes. The results sometimes become messy and not entirely reliable, though even then they are either decidedly invaluable to me or still better than starting from scratch.
My cook’s notebooks sit in a narrow, neatly organized utility drawer in my Warsaw kitchen, along with things like food thermometers, wine tools, ceramic tiles, rubber bands, binder clips, river stones, and digital scales. When I am at home, I don’t even notice the way these books are practically in daily use, with me cribbing from them or scribbling in them or both. But when they are out of reach, I am quickly missing them something awful. Alas, culinary diaries don’t travel well. It’s bad enough should they get left behind at our summer home, which could mean days or weeks without my trusty notes in the city. But leaving them behind in some key-code-access rental? That’s the real scare.
Sometimes, if I’m notebook-deprived but fixing to bake, I can go to the source on the web, as long as there was one and provided I remember my likely tweaks, but much of the time my scribbles are too far removed from anything searchable. Occasionally, I have scrolled back through months or years of chat messages when I knew I had shared a successful recipe with a friend. (Way too much scrolling and far too few recipes.) What I really need, I’ve been telling myself, is a digital archive of my go-to hits. Surely, if it’s posted online—and thus in reach even when my device isn’t—that’s even better? Here I go, then. The collected works of one industrious home baker, posted, at last, in the spirit of pragmatism.
