Recipe for a Cookbook

It's like a drawing of a drawing of a drawing.

I don’t know about you, but I draw the plans for my plans. This has always been my process. Even when figuring out a simple woodworking project, the various lumber calculations end up drawn out with attention to fonts and the shading of the construction details. One of the things this does is to help me to focus on the important bits; if it doesn’t fit on the page, it’s probably not important—or I haven’t thought it through sufficiently to know whether it’s important. Looking at the drawing tends to reveal these things.

This approach also helps me to identify questions I’m not necessarily considering when simply listing materials. In the case of this cookbook, there are layers of considerations and vast swathes of uncertainties. But they’re getting figured out.

When drawing a single recipe, there’s the question of granularity; do I need to illustrate every turn of the spoon or sprinkle of herb? Taken as a set of recipes, there’s the question of consistency; does this recipe have too much detail, and that one not enough? Tacking up a dozen pages on my wall and standing back reveals some larger patterns, as well. There’s a lot of tacking going on, lemme tell you.

I’m not aiming for perfection, just a degree of consistency.

Anyway, development continues apace. I’d hoped to release the first full recipe by now, but watching friends follow some of the recipes proved so instructive that I’m redrawing some things. Thanks for your patience.