THE PROBLEM WITH COOKBOOKS
Dear friends,
Inspired by our parents' overflowing, stained, and yellowed cookbooks, we started cutting out the important recipes from our cookbooks and collecting them in a separate book.
At first, this hurts.
In the next step, it frees the mind and creates relevance.
That's how the idea for our first book project came about, and we are very happy with how beautifully it turned out:
FB_CULINARIUM
A recipe collection book.
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A high-quality handcrafted book for collecting, documenting, and sharing recipes, inspirations, and kitchen secrets - for families, life stages, or special themed collections.
Cut-out recipe pages from other cookbooks are allowed to gradually make the book bulge, sauce stains & grease splatters are explicitly welcome and ultimately add to the book's personality.
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 chose, for some unknown reason, to collect her other recipes in as well.
Yellowed, stained and above all overflowing with inserted notes, handwritten notes, pictures, pages from magazines, dried flowers and photocopies from other cookbooks, which she sometimes more, sometimes less consistently compiled and collected.
What at first glance appears chaotic and confusing to outsiders was actually a strictly organized reference work, filled to the brim with content relevant to her and accessible at all times.
We often find that the beautiful recipes and pictures from new cookbooks get lost quite quickly as soon as they land on the shelf.
When we first browse through the books, we bookmark them or take photos with our phones, but when we need a specific recipe, our ordering system collapses and we give in to the vague "order" of our beloved cookbook collection and prefer to quickly look things up online.
(On bad days, we barely manage not to end up as the very first search result, while behind us on the shelf are perfectly crafted recipes by highly decorated chefs. Quite absurd, actually.)
For us as children, by the way, this book holds an incredibly high emotional and culinary value - all the favorite (and also most hated) foods of our childhood, birthday cakes, casseroles, stews, etc. are collected in this book.
We can now recreate them for our own children, eat our mother’s food once again 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 containing everything that matters.
However, we take it one step further, because usually only a handful of recipes make up the value of a cookbook - and with scissors and tape, this value can be perfectly transferred from one book to another.
Even if it hurts at first and feels quite awful to destroy the beloved cookbooks, especially since it is then, of course, the pages with the favorite recipes that have so far made up the value of the books for us.
(With cooking magazines, by the way, it feels the other way around - 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 so valuable to us has truly been completely preserved - the recipes along with pictures and texts are intact in the book, only our relationship has shifted slightly: The process of cutting and pasting into our own book is a process of appropriation, of incorporation, the recipes are now "our" recipes. A thoroughly enriching feeling.
So what is missing?
What wasn’t important anyway and won’t be lost either - the cookbooks are still on the shelf (waiting not to be used :)
But suddenly this new book is in front of us, enriched with the essence of our cookbook collection, a distillation 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 factor in life?
What value do things have without the meaning and significance we assign to them?
OBJECTS OF VALUE
In the design, we have deliberately sought a connection to old songbooks, Bibles, compendiums and encyclopedias - all those books meant to last more than one lifetime and which always carry an elusive sense of essentiality and reverence, and whose contents always seem valuable by their very design.
The recycled leather or linen cover feels good to the touch; the many bookbinding details such as the gold edges, embossing and graphic finesse invite exploration and make the book pleasantly complex; the light order of the book encourages you to explore your own way of thinking and find a specific order for it.
And last but not least, we have tried to make handling the book as intuitive and fun as possible with pragmatic details (such as the enclosed sheet of custom-made strips of double-sided luxury adhesive tape (you don't understand it until you use it), the rubber band on both sides to keep the pages open, the collection pocket, the index at the end and the numbered pages).
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DO'S & DONT'S
Always glue pages on one side only: This saves tape and you can fold up the pages and use the space underneath for notes.
When cutting 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.
Polaroid pictures are expensive but look great in the book.
Write texts and messages on separate pieces of paper and only glue them in when you are happy. It's worth it. (See our supplementary KRITZELKRITZEL blocks).
Consistently cut out failed pages and start again: Only great pages that are a joy to read are allowed in the Culinarium.
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 SOFA etc.) and mark them with one of the 4 ribbons.
MAKE AN EFFORT. This is the only way to create something special in the end. As always in life.
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