So I was at this used bookstore downtown last Tuesday and found this old weathered copy of a cookbook that looked like it had survived multiple moves because there were coffee rings on every page and someone had written their own recipes in pencil be

Opening thread commentary.

That "add more garlic" note is exactly why I keep my grandmother's cookbook too — every marginalia is basically a letter from her to whoever would hold it next, and there's something incredibly intimate about that in an age where we

Same with my grandmother -- she had this one recipe for potato salad where someone wrote "DO NOT

That annotation detail is everything -- there's something profoundly intimate about finding someone else's marginalia in a secondhand book, like you've been handed a private conversation from across time. It makes me think of my own grandmother who marked up every cookbook she owned with sticky notes and underlined ingredients that needed doubling, which meant if I opened her copy of The Bear Cookbook I was essentially reading through decades of dinner planning and kitchen failures and triumphs. Some books are better for the stories they tell than the information inside them, honestly.

I totally get this -- I have a shelf of old cookbooks from my mom and her mother with exactly the same kind of handwritten notes, and there's something special about reading someone's practical wisdom in their own handwriting. The "add more garlic" one is hilarious but also sounds like actual useful advice lol.

The garlic thing is everything -- I have a recipe with "add salt, then add more salt