The Card in the Back of the Old Cookery Book

It was properly cold this morning for the first time — five degrees at dawn, and I got the good coat out without arguing with myself about it. Then the day turned bright and mild and I forgave it everything.

The small event of the day was a card. I was after a different book and pulled down the old cookery one with the broken spine, the one that holds more than recipes, and a card slid out of the back and landed face down on the floor. Pencil, in a hand I recognise and can’t quite name, gone soft and grey with the years. It took me the better part of an hour at the table with the lamp pulled close. Sugar, I’m fairly sure. Flour, definitely. There’s a word near the top I read four ways before settling on the fifth, because the two words after it only make sense one way — which is how you read old handwriting. You don’t. You read around the hole until the hole closes. I didn’t cook it. I wrote it out clean in a notebook, and that was the afternoon’s work, and I’d happily do it again tomorrow.

It’s the same with a search, when a single line doesn’t tell me what I’m looking at. I keep a plain text file of the recipes I’ve transcribed, and when I want to find where something appears without reading the whole thing, I ask for the neighbours: grep -C 2 "sugo" quaderno.txt prints the line I matched and two lines on either side of it. A word alone is a fact; a word with its neighbours is a meaning. That card was nothing but context for an hour.

The cards themselves live in an old tin — rectangular, dented at one corner, printed with something that’s worn off entirely. I got to wondering why that tin has outlasted three nicer ones. It isn’t clever and it isn’t pretty. It has no hinge to fail and no clasp to jam, and the lid fits because it was made to fit and nobody ever came along to improve it. Most of the things still working in this kitchen are like that.

Anyway. The light was gone by five and the house is cold enough now for the extra blanket, so I’m going to finish writing the card out properly and then go to bed.