A handwritten holiday cookbook is a piece of ordinary-person history that one day, someone will love to read.
Happy New Year to you! A new year signals a fresh start, and it's a great time to get organized. Even though the holidays are over, and in your mind, you may be thinking it's time to just...move on...but hear me out! I have a fun project you can think about this weekend that next year (and the years to follow), you'll be happy you did: putting together your own holiday recipe book.
Back in 1991 I started cooking for real and entertaining at Christmas. As I built up my repertoire and tried new things, I needed a place where all the recipes could live, so I found a nice hardcover notebook and started writing them down. This was just a few years before everything changed with the "world wide web" and every recipe we could ever want was at the end of a google search. Recipe ideas came from cookbooks and my own experiments, and if I didn't write them down, they would be lost forever.
There's nothing wrong with convenient electronic means of saving and organizing recipes, it's just that there is something undeniably missing from this method, and that is you. Your handwriting, your notes in the margins, your splatters and folded pages and recipes that show, from how messed up they are, how many times you've made them, and the adjustments made over time. I think that's a shame. I imagine one of my kids, or later, a stranger maybe, coming across my notebook and stumbling on a little piece of ordinary-person history. I'd also like them to make the recipes, and taste what we tasted at a particular moment in time. A hand-written notebook of recipes builds on food history in a way that digital recipes can't, and over time, you create a cookbook written by you. I'm also a sucker for nice notebooks, so there's that!
The holiday notebook isn't for every recipe I come across but just those I make every year, the ones that the fam comes to expect and that really work for the types of celebrations we have. In our house we celebrate Christmas, but for you, it could be Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Festivus, or whatever is meaningful to your family. Each year I try out a few new things, and if we love them, into the notebook they go. I also like that it's in chronological order, and as the years go by it becomes an artifact of what were popular appetizers in 1991 (Crustless Carrot Quiches and "Fiesta" Shrimp) or that first time in 2004 I started making the Creamed Spinach and Leeks we all love and eat almost every holiday.
Having everything in one place also means I never have to search for a recipe. Over the years I added a few cocktails here and there, so I was inspired to start another book of nothing but drinks and cocktails, which of course meant a trip to the bookstore for another new notebook. The same happened with holiday baking recipes, and another one called "cooking notes", where I jot down anything that works: a thrown-together spice rub, or a pizza made with what was on hand and the flavours were amazing. This is how food professionals work, and how new recipes are created. Write that s*%t down! I love the way the book itself tells a story in the way the pages naturally fall open to the places they've been open the most, to the brioche dinner rolls and toffee almond bars and hashbrown casserole my former mother-in-law made famous. The Quebec fish pie is in the "cooking notes" book from when I played around with the idea of it last Christmas, but it will now go in the main holiday book, because it was a hit. Food is history and food is family. What's your family food story?
Comments