How To Make Recipes Easier with “Peach-Bread Notation”
Mom was peachy-keen and a genius, apparently.
I love to cook, but only when things are chill. As soon as I feel the pressure feeding people in a hurry, I get tunnel vision. I would love some help in the kitchen, but I get so overwhelmed trying to figure out where to direct them that it just worse. It’s easier on my psyche to do it all by myself. That’s a lot less fun for me and my family.
The Quest
Over the years I’ve been stuck with these gnawing questions:
- How can you figure out a recipe quickly? Or find a recipe that cuts right to it without a ton of extra words?
- How do you avoid the trap of realizing you have to soak or chill something overnight when it’s obviously too late?
- When you have a helper, how can you tell what can easily be done in parallel so that it’s actually “helping”?
Some of these questions have been dogging me for years. I gained a little bit of hope from Tim Ferriss’ shorthand recipe format in The 4-Hour Chef. But these were a little hard to decipher for the uninitiated. Some recipe books do a better job than others with their layout: Cook’s Illustrated cookbooks make it easy to skip to story and get right to the recipe. But it’s still a little too easy to miss details like “soak overnight.”
The Solution
While helping my stepfather pack for a move, my stepbrother rescued Mom’s old recipes from the discard pile. (Thank you, brother!) As I went through my the old recipes, marveling at her beautiful handwriting, and wondering just how many bran muffin recipes one person could possibly need, I found an old folded-up paper towel. Hmmm…
I thought to myself, “This has got to be a good recipe if it’s written down on the only paper she could find.” Indeed it was a good recipe! However, more surprising was that my mom had solved the riddle … She must have written this in the late ’80s or early ’90s. I was holding a historic masterpiece of information design that rivals anything from Edward Tufte (not that I’m biased, or anything).
Mom found a way to show an entire recipe, and all its steps, in one concise design. She also inadvertently solved the problem of revealing which steps could be done in parallel. There’s even a sense of the rhythm or timeline. Donna Talbert, you were brilliant!
As far as I know, my mom is the inventor of this method. I call it “peach-bread annotation” because, if the recipe wasn’t her inspiration, it certainly was mine. I’ve used this annotation method to illustrate the original recipe for Peach Bread below:
Colophon
I used Miro to lay this out, using the “text” and “shape” tools. It’s that simple. You can do it, too!
Look for more recipes in this publication as they come. Add your own! And let me know if you have ideas for how to improve this method.
