Making a Food Zine in Three Days

Actually, make that one day

Many ideas live (and die) inside my head. Christmas, I’d been thinking since September, would make a great theme for a zine. After all, I run a vintage cookbook shop. I have a lot of Christmas recipes I could share.

But like the lifecycle of most of my ideas it never made it to fruition. Until one morning when it leaped so ferociously to the forefront of my mind I found myself enquiring with a printing house, very casually, about the price of printing something. Just so I knew. For future reference.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself agreeing with Jordan, co-owner of PageMasters, to pop in on Friday to print my zine. Because at that very moment there was no zine. It literally did not exist. It was just one of my many ideas, trapped inside my head.

I looked at my phone’s calendar. Friday was in three days.

Crap.

I devised a plan when choosing from one of the many, many cookbooks — recipes either had to include a weird ingredient, or be outdated (compared to modern standards). A fish baked with corn flakes? Perfect. A cake made with 40 eggs? Even better.

Predictably things very quickly went tits up. Other work came in, the zine neglected. I caught a cold. I decided I would paint every illustration by hand (what was I thinking). I had too many recipes. Then too few. Before I knew it it was Thursday evening. 1am. Everything looked so bad. HOW CAN I PUT THIS OUT, I wailed to Ferry. I went to bed at 2am in a strop.

Surprisingly I woke up to a zine. Like the elves and the shoemaker, Ferry — the elf in this scenario — redrew all of the illustrations for the shoemaker (me). He laid out the text. He finished it.

I had a zine.

You can buy the zine here for £1