You might remember me gushing over Becks & Posh's perfectly posh cookbook note-taking last October. The image had sent me into a flurry of thoughts about how much more I should be writing in my cookbooks, and made me wish that my writing looked nicer when I did get out the pen. But all of that was about comments, substitutions, and all-around good cookbook tidings.
But what do you do when the recipe, to put it bluntly, sucks? Once again, we have note-taking gold via Becks & Posh. It seems that once, poor Sam made a Castagnaccio, which went down in infamy as "really bad food Sam has made." It was so bad, in fact, that she wrote the above note in the margin. if you can't read it: "This is the shittiest crapest most disgusting tasting cake I ever made in my WHOLE LIFE."
So it got me thinking: What do you do when a recipe turns out terribly? Do you rant in the margins? Cross it out with a big, thick X? Doodle a little skull and crossbones near the title?* Clip it out and give it to a friend to try, so they can unknowingly share your tastebud misery?
*Now that is what every cook needs: small skull and crossbones stickers to plunk down on offensive recipes!
One of the best additions to a cookbook is not the mouth-watering images, but rather the margin notes. They are not only a great way to remember thoughts and alterations on a dish, but also a way to give it all a sense of history. One can record the thoughts and feelings that a dish evokes, and years later revisit it, or share the thoughts and pages with others -- making it a communal experience well after the fact.
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