A chunky, square book found in a charity shop one Monday morning on the way to the dentist, Baking cried out to be altered. Which is not to say I haven't used some of the recipes - the red onion tarte tatin was delicious - a similar recipe is
here (you need a frying pan that can go into the oven, but instead of making your own pastry you can use bought puff pastry).
There seemed to be lots of verbs in the instructions, so I started cutting out all of them, which made some nice holey pages but after the first thrill wore off, seemed utterly pointless. I saved the cut words, and kept them separate in little bags, perhaps with a view to joining them up later -
First, though, some went back into the holes left in the pages. The selection of verbs used in cooking directions doesn't make for poetry, or even absurdity -
so I started being more selective about what part of the photograph to desecrate (which has no relation to the subsequent filleted recipe) -
As my scalpel hand got tired, the selectivity got ever greater -
The project isn't finished and probably won't even be part of the assessment material - it feels too silly and unfocused, even though it arose from the "forgetting how to cook" part of my "loss of memory" theme. It's degenerated into something trite.
The recipes are still usable, even without the verbs. After all, "back in the day" a recipe consisted of just the list of ingredients, as every cook knew how to put them together. And not so long ago, a recipe in a cookbook wouldn't necessarily have the ingredients listed in the order they were to be used.
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