THE PROBLEM WITH COOKBOOKS
Dear friends,
Inspired by the overflowing, stained, yellowed cookbooks of our parents, we started cutting out the important recipes from our cookbooks and collecting them in a separate book.
That hurts at first.
The next step frees the mind and creates relevance.
This is how the idea for our first book project came about, and we’re very happy with how beautiful it turned out:
FB_CULINARIUM
A recipe collection book.
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A high-quality handmade book for collecting, documenting, and passing on recipes, inspirations, and kitchen secrets – for families, life phases, or special themed collections.
Torn-out recipe pages from other cookbooks are allowed to gradually bulge the book, sauce stains & grease splatters are explicitly welcome and ultimately add to the book’s character.
NOW AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP
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OUR MOTHER'S COOKBOOK
We fondly remember our mother’s recipe book – some Italian cookbook she inexplicably chose to also gather her other recipes in.
Yellowed, stained, and above all overflowing with inserted notes, handwritten comments, pictures, magazine pages, dried flowers, and photocopies from other cookbooks, which she collected more or less consistently over time.
What looks chaotic and confusing to outsiders at first glance was actually a strictly organized reference work, packed with relevant content and always accessible.
We often find that the great recipes and pictures from new cookbooks get lost quite quickly once they land on the shelf.
At first, we obediently bookmark a few pages in the books or take photos with our phones, but as soon as we need a specific recipe, the organization system collapses and we give up on the vague "order" of the beloved cookbook collection and quickly look online instead.
On bad days, we barely manage not to end up on Chefkoch.de, while behind us on the shelf are perfectly crafted recipes from highly decorated chefs. Quite absurd, really.
For us as children, this book has an incredibly high emotional and culinary value - all favorite meals (and also hated meals) from our childhood, birthday cakes, casseroles, stews, etc. are gathered in this book.
We can now cook them again for our own children, eat our mother's food once more, and remember together - her, our childhood, and our youth.
THE IDEA FOR THE BOOK
And so the idea was born - a recipe collection book, inspired by our mother's cookbook. A family cookbook, a culinary diary, a personal kitchen compendium that contains everything important.
However, we go one step further, because usually it is only a handful of recipes that make a cookbook valuable - and with scissors and tape this value can be excellently transferred from one book to another.
Even though it hurts at first and feels terrible to destroy the beloved cookbooks, especially since it is of course the pages with the favorite recipes that have so far made the books valuable to us.
(By the way, with cooking magazines it feels exactly the opposite - being included in a Kulinarium is the best thing that can happen to any magazine recipe.)
The pain and doubt only ease the moment the first 20 pages in the Kulinarium are filled with content:
What made the cookbooks valuable to us has been completely preserved – the recipes along with pictures and texts are intact in the book, only our relationship has slightly changed: The process of cutting out and integrating into our own book is a process of appropriation, of internalizing, the recipes are now "our" recipes. An enriching feeling.
So what is missing?
What was not important anyway and is not lost - the cookbooks still stand on the shelf.
However, suddenly this new book lies before us, enriched with the essence of our cookbook collection, an extract of our own culinary passion and thus an immediately valuable object, personal & close.
Almost annoyingly relevant.
And that frees the mind - isn't relevance the most important parameter in life?
What value do things have without the meaning and significance we assign to them?
VALUABLE OBJECTS
In the design, we deliberately sought a connection to old hymnals, Bibles, compendiums, and encyclopedias – all those books meant to last more than a lifetime and always carrying a subtle aura of significance and reverence, whose content already appears valuable simply through the design.
The cover made of recycled leather or linen feels pleasant in the hand; the many bookbinding details like gilt edges, blind embossing, and graphic finesse invite exploration and make the book pleasantly complex. The book’s clear order encourages exploring your own way of thinking and finding a specific order for it.
And last but not least, we tried to make handling the book as intuitive and enjoyable as possible with pragmatic details (like the included sheet with custom-sized strips of double-sided luxury tape (you only understand this once you use it), the double-sided elastic band to keep pages open, the frog pocket, the index at the end, and the numbered pages).
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TIPS FOR USE
1 – Always glue pages on only one side: This saves tape and allows you to flip the pages up and use the space underneath for notes.
2 – When cutting out from cookbooks, always check the back – if there are good recipes on both sides: take a photo, print it out, and then glue it in.
3 – Polaroid pictures are expensive but look fantastic in the book.
4 – Write texts and notes on separate slips first and only glue them in when you are satisfied. It’s worth it. (See our additional KRITZELKRITZEL pads)
5 – Consistently cut out failed pages and start over: In the Kulinarium, there should only be great pages that bring joy.
6 - Use the numbered index at the end of the book right from the start. It can be helpful to define sections in advance (e.g., PASTA, SALADS, SUNDAY ON THE COUCH, etc.) and mark them with one of the 4 bookmarks.
7 – PUT IN THE EFFORT. Only then does something special emerge in the end. As always in life.
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