Keeping the Failed Batches

My first jar of calendula oil grew a grey fur in eight days. I had used fresh flowers, straight from the garden, and packed them in tight. I didn't know yet that fresh flowers carry water, and water in oil means mould.

I almost didn't write it down. It felt embarrassing. But that jar taught me more than the ten good ones since, and now every failure goes in the notebook, in red pencil.

From the red pencil pages

• Calendula oil, year one: fresh flowers, mould in a week. Use dried.
• Candied peel, batch two: turned up the heat to hurry it. Toffee. Keep it at the barest simmer.
• Pastila, first try: spread too thick, still sticky after ten hours. Five millimetres, no more.
• Rose hip tea: didn't strain through cloth. Itchy throat for an hour. Always use cloth.

Old recipe books rarely tell you what goes wrong. They give you the finished, perfect version, as if it arrived that way. I would rather show the whole process — including the parts where it didn't work — because that is how anybody actually learns.

That is also why the films show the second batch, and the notes tell you what happened to the first.