Delicious Notes II: How Amie McGraham and Domenica Marchetti Record Recipes
"Most of my recipes start in a Composition or Decomposition notebook!"
Happy Thursday! Welcome to another serving of delicious food writing by two more of my favorite writers:
and . You can read part 1 (featuring and ) here.Paid Subscribers, look out for a short postscript on how I take notes in the kitchen. I thought it would be fun to see an amateur cook’s scribbles after savoring the experts’ notes!
Without further ado, here’s Domenica and Amie!
Jillian’s note: My maternal grandfather came from a large Italian family, and I have fond memories of going to my great-grandmother’s home for Christmas-eve dinners. I can still smell the tomato sauce bubbling on the stove; I can still hear the crescendo of Italian-American voices. So, reading Domenica’s writing feels like a homecoming. There is something deeply nourishing about traditions, and Domenica has a talent for capturing the depth of Italian cooking. She is the author of eight (!) cookbooks on Italian cuisine. My personal favorite is The Glorious Vegetables of Italy—reading it makes me feel like I’m in an Italian garden. She shares recipes in her gorgeous newsletter,
. Here’s Domenica…It might seem odd for someone who writes about Italian cooking to share notes on quiche. But it makes sense if you know that I grew up in 1970s New Jersey, where at one point quiche was all the rage. I’ve loved since I was a kid and have never stopped making it, though I’ve tweaked my recipe considerably over the years.
NOTES ON MY NOTES: Most of my recipes start in a Composition or Decomposition notebook, a habit I started while working on my first book in 2004. The lack of detail in these hand-written recipe notes I’m sharing is typical for me. I can easily fill in the blanks, but others would have a hard time. Repetitive strain injury means I have to curtail what I write by hand, so I include only the most pertinent information. As soon as the recipe is fully tested, I move from notebook to computer and add in the details.
This is from an old notebook circa 1990, years before I began professionally developing recipes and writing about food. Quiche Lorraine is the first recipe in the notebook. It is probably based on one my mom used to make. The recipe is short on detail, but I was familiar with making quiche, so I didn’t need them. No crust recipe is included. It’s likely I used the 9-inch single-crust recipe from Betty Crocker, which was my go-to for many years.
I haven’t made this specific quiche recipe in years, but the ratio of milk/cream to eggs is not far off from the formula I use now for quiche filling. (I would not use 12 slices of bacon, and I would sauté the onion in a little rendered bacon fat, not it raw to the filling.)
Following a 2018 trip to France, during which I had a memorably creamy deep-dish quiche, I resolved to recreate it. By then, my go-to crust was based on one by Jacques Pepin. I scaled it up to fit a deep 9-inch fluted pan with flared sides, 2 1/4 inches in height. Whenever I make quiche, I refer back to this crust recipe.
Measurements are recorded in volume and weight (in grams), something I started doing about a decade ago, not just for my non-American readers, but also because weight measurement is more accurate.
Filling: There are no amounts given for the filling; I probably just “eyeballed” the quantities as I was assembling quiche for dinner.
An early version of a quiche recipe that eventually made it into my Substack. I circled the ingredients for the custard—cream, milk, and eggs. I often change the ratio of cream to milk; and sometimes I use four eggs, sometimes five, depending on the other filling ingredients.
This is a more detailed version of the broccoli-blue cheese quiche, with ingredients measured and weighed.
As usual, crust instructions are minimal here because it’s something I’ve been doing for so long I don’t need to write them down. The rest of the instructions are also pared down, though I include specific amounts in volume, ounces & grams, plus sautéing times and visual cues, and other pertinent details (note instruction to bake the quiche on a baking sheet, & weight calculations on second page).
When I typed up the recipe on the computer, I wrote 3 full paragraphs just on making the crust, detailing how to mix the dough, how to roll it out and fit it into the quiche pan, and how to blind-bake it. Then I filled in the details for the rest of the recipe. I published the final version on my Substack in March 2023.
Read more of Domenica’s writing at
!Jillian’s Note: One of the first newsletters I subscribed to was Amie’s Each post delivers 100 words of poetry—they are bite-sized literary treats. And then, Amie began , a posthumous collaboration with her mother, Karyl, who had written her own (print) food newsletter. It’s a gorgeous interweaving of mother’s and daughter’s writing. Amie’s writing has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including Brevity, Wild Roof Journal, Maine Magazine, Multiplicity, Exposition Review and was selected by Intrepid Times as the winner of the 2022 “Wrong Turns” travel writing competition. Here’s Amie…
Recipes are my comfort food! With the recent launch of Cook & Tell, my digital reboot of the monthly cooking newsletter my late mom wrote and illustrated for 30-plus years, I’ve amassed quite a collection.
Besides the newsletter archives that take up an entire room in the 200-year-old island farmhouse where I grew up, I’ve got stacks of clippings, a digital recipe app, vintage cookbooks, index cards, recipes from other newsletters and blogs, and handwritten recipes my subscribers have mailed in. It’s become a bit overwhelming.
To get organized, I created a master list of all the recipes I want to try, adding to it as I acquire more recipes. I divide the list into various categories and it’s definitely not fancy, just a simple Word document. At the beginning of the week, I review the list and determine two or three recipes to test. Then I note them on a post-it in my daily journal.
While I’m making each dish, I jot down “Field Notes” in my daily journal using orange and green ink for quick reference. Some of these notes might become a paragraph or two that appear as a recipe endnote or an “ort” in my newsletter when I feature that recipe, or they may show up in abbreviated form as an Instagram “Recipe of the Month” post. Some have been published in recipe card microstories, a 100-word series in my other newsletter, the micro mashup.
I also keep a separate hard-bound Recipe Scrapbook where I handwrite recipes I’ve made and really like. Some—not always the best, but those that tell the best stories—get transcribed into this scrapbook.
After I make a dish—good, bad, indifferent—I jot it on a lined sticky note in front pages of the Recipe Scrapbook (decidedly un-fancy).
And some are relegated to the annals of my What Not To Cook notebook, to be featured in upcoming newsletters.
I used to be afraid to make notes in cookbooks, but after reading through so many vintage cookbooks in my mother’s collection, I realize the marginalia tell family history. Cookbooks are legacies!
My mom had mad skills when it came to marginalia. In addition to the notes she scribbled in her beloved Joy of Cooking cookbook (a wedding gift from her mother), she kept a recipe binder filled with handwritten recipes and a multitude of testing notes. This may not appear to be an icon of organization, but it was the launchpad to her future as a food-writer. She also filled dozens of sketchbooks and journals, jotting ideas and sketches for her newsletter, and later, the cookbook she published in 2001.
Read more of Amie’s writing at
andI’ve really enjoyed featuring brilliant Substack writers on Noted. Would you like to see more of these kinds of posts? Or do you prefer historical figures? I’d love to know what kinds of Substack writers you would like to see featured on Noted.
We love your comments! Let us know what you think below.
Till next week,
I would like to vote "all of the above"!
(also I clicked the 'leave a comment' button in the newsletter first and it somehow took me to comment on the Eminem post - so I've deleted and moved the comment here!)
Two of my favorites too, Jillian! Loved seeing your notes, Domenica and Amie!