Book du jour - "Baking"

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.

Book du jour - Cooking from Memory

After the photoshoot, making the book -- taking ever more words out of the recipe, as the pages go on.

I've kept the cut-out words but don't think they're needed. One idea, though, is to attach cut-out words to the photo beneath, so that at first glance the recipe looks complete, and only when you turn the page do the holes appear. In this case the words to cut would be those that are remembered, not those that are forgotten.

A page of filletage -

 and my favourite photo -

Now, sewing and a cover.

Book du jour - filletage

As there seems to be no word for "the process of cutting things out of paper or, especially, book pages", I am inventing one:  filletage. The word sounds rather like frottage, the process of taking rubbings. However, filletage is a kind of erasure - subtractive - whereas frottage involves making marks and thus is additive.

The French word filletage has to do with threads, as on screws - some examples of such usage are here. The word fillet refers to a  band (especially a headband), and thus has evolved to denote a slice of meat or fish. In my own appropriated usage, filletage is a kind of cutting out of strips, like a fillet of fish is cut away from the bones.

filletage

I am filleting the (scanned in) pages of a German recipe book, my mother's recipe book, Dr Oetker's "Backen macht Freude". The splashes on the pages show which recipes were used most often, and those pages are the ones I've chosen for scanning in and cutting up.

First the verbs went - all the cooking processes that get muddled when your sequential memory (the ability to recall items in order) starts to get lost. Then I took out the names of ingredients as well - perhaps this is excessive. Something to think about before going further.