What I Learned Keeping a Kitchen Notebook
There is a notebook on the shelf above the stove. Since March of 2022 I have written one line in it after dinner: what we ate, and occasionally a word about whether it worked. It has a grease mark on the cover in the shape of a thumb.
Three years in, it has become the most useful object in the kitchen.
The rotation is nineteen dishes long
Not thirty. Not the four hundred recipes I have bookmarked. Nineteen dishes account for about 70% of every dinner we have eaten in three years, and eleven of the nineteen were already in the rotation before the notebook started.
This was mildly deflating and enormously freeing. I stopped feeling that I ought to be cooking more widely and started making the nineteen better, which is a much more achievable project.
The notes are worth more than the log
The line that says Tuesday — the lentil thing is worth very little. The line that says the lentil thing, too much liquid again, start with 3 cups has saved that dish four separate times, because I have forgotten it four separate times.
What I write now:
- What went wrong, specifically, in units.
- Anything I substituted, and whether it was better.
- How long it actually took, which is never what the recipe says.
- Whether anyone asked for it again, which is the only review that matters.
The recipe tells you what somebody else did in their kitchen. The notebook tells you what happened in yours, and after about a year the second one is considerably more useful.
Three things the log caught that I would never have noticed
We eat the same thing on Thursdays. Not by design. Thursday is the day the vegetables are running out and the will has gone, and it is pasta, every time, and now I buy for it deliberately instead of pretending otherwise.
Every new recipe I tried in December failed. Three years running. Too much going on, too little attention. I have stopped trying new things in December.
The dishes I am proudest of are not the ones we eat. The elaborate entries cluster around visitors and holidays. The nineteen are plain, fast and good, and the gap between what I like cooking and what we actually live on was invisible to me until it was written down in a column.
Start anyway
You do not need a system. One line, after dinner, in whatever is nearest. Mine is illegible for most of 2023 and it still works, because the value is not in the handwriting. It is in the fact that by the time you have three hundred lines, the kitchen has told you what it is, and you can stop guessing.
