The Tattooed Cookbook

Harry Harris takes a loving look at the cookbook as we know it and reasons why we should all delve into the joy of writing all over it, hence, prolonging its centuries-old history

- Harry Harris

Growing up, our shelves were full of cookbooks, and each cookbook, full of my mum’s handwriting. Dates when recipes had been cooked, who they’d been cooked for, whether or not they were any good, any alterations that had to be made (“too salty,” “double the recipe,” “didn’t have this, used that instead”). Where other forms of literature can feel rarefied, even precious to some, cookbooks are ripe for this kind of vandalism.

Truth be told, the amount of cookbooks I have on my shelves far outweigh the amount of time I have to make the recipes on the folded down pages within them, but the ones I go back to are obvious before you even turn to them—crinkled paper, stain-splattered, and annotated. I’ve halved the amount of crème fraîche in a leek gratin recipe from Rukmini Iyers’ The Green Roasting Tin. I’ve added sumac to the spice mix for a carrot and chickpea salad from Ruby Tandoh’s Flavour. I’ve scratched out the ingredient “smoked water” from a recipe in Anna Jones’ The Modern Cook’s Year. For better or worse, the cookbooks I own are owned by nobody else.

If you do this too, and feel guilty about scratching through thoroughly tested recipes or messing up beautiful paper stock, you needn’t—the practice of annotating cookbooks is intrinsic to the experience of reading, and indeed, using them. Often annotations can provide a window into the owner’s life. British cookbook author Elizabeth David, whose library is available to look through at The Guildhall in London, would write acerbic, often damning notes in the books she acquired. Beside a recipe entitled “Italian Salad” in a book called