13 July 2012

Book du jour - filletage

As there seems to be no word for "the process of cutting things out of paper or, especially, book pages", I am inventing one:  filletage. The word sounds rather like frottage, the process of taking rubbings. However, filletage is a kind of erasure - subtractive - whereas frottage involves making marks and thus is additive.

The French word filletage has to do with threads, as on screws - some examples of such usage are here. The word fillet refers to a  band (especially a headband), and thus has evolved to denote a slice of meat or fish. In my own appropriated usage, filletage is a kind of cutting out of strips, like a fillet of fish is cut away from the bones.

filletage
I am filleting the (scanned in) pages of a German recipe book, my mother's recipe book, Dr Oetker's "Backen macht Freude". The splashes on the pages show which recipes were used most often, and those pages are the ones I've chosen for scanning in and cutting up.

First the verbs went - all the cooking processes that get muddled when your sequential memory (the ability to recall items in order) starts to get lost. Then I took out the names of ingredients as well - perhaps this is excessive. Something to think about before going further.


1 comment:

irene macwilliam said...

What a brilliant idea of progressivly filleting the verbs (the doing bits) and then the ingredients (the memory bit), it is so like the descent into alzheimers. The use of your mums splattered recipe book is so appropriate for this.
Irene MacWilliam