Cooking is a practice which relies heavily on passing down recipes, techniques and ideas from one person to the next. Old family recipe books are littered with scrawled notes in the margins and recipes torn out of magazines stuffed between the pages.
Inspired by this notion, the forms the recipes in this cookbook take reflect their possible imagined origin, connoting the process of travelling and picking up on ideas from many different sources.
I examined Sally Clarke’s writing, making note of the places she traveled to, the origins of the dishes she created and her stories of finding recipes from strangers she met all over the world. To reflect her stories, I designed the ingredient lists and methods of each recipe to appear like found printed ephemera which are stuck, scrapbook-like within the cookbook.
Whilst some of the elements have more clear historical design influences than others, they all have a sense of retro-inspired timelessness: being from somewhere in the past which you can't quite place. I was careful to spend time examining how design from different countries and time periods actually appeared, rather than how I thought they might. This research phase, which continued throughout the project, was incredibly informative and interesting. If there’s one thing I love more than design, it’s design PLUS history.