3+24+157 Cooking mashups

  • Marios Linakis

"Cooking mashups" is an unconventional recipe book for Corfu chef Giorgos Gerekos, inviting readers to combine random flavours and ingredients, in search of that great mistake, that made the perfect recipe. The book is designed to be played, rather than read, featuring a collection of ingredients, one on every page. Readers are encouraged to blindly shuffle through the pages, pick random page combinations, cook the ingredients, and document intriguing recipes: 3+24+157. "Cooking mashups" is designed to mirror the chef’s experimental cooking at his Corfu restaurant: “Sougo”, which embraces chance as a key ingredient for success. Unlike conventional books of narrative and structure, “Cooking mashups” is entirely non-sensical. Ingredients are sprinkled among the pages in no specific order and pagination serves as a vehicle for randomness, rather than order. The book is designed as a game, so ease-of-use and playfulness are important. Design follows a simplistic and intuitive philosophy of elementary typography and primitive colours, one for every ingredient. Interchanging white book jackets featuring random page combinations are added to accentuate experimentation and provide a foreword for the book, while the purist covers contrast the pluralism of the book, adding to the element of surprise, itself an integral part of an experiment.