Make it yours

These recipes were always meant to travel. My parents photocopied them, three-hole-punched them, and mailed them to the relatives. Now you can make a binder of your own.

What a binder is

A binder is your own edition of this cookbook. Yours to curate. Yours to add to. Yours to leave to your kids. Every binder descends from another — the Original, or someone else’s. On every recipe you keep or modify, the lineage stays visible. From The Original Binder, ~1981. Or From Will’s Binder, 2026. The chain doesn’t end.

What you can do in your binder:

Keep the recipes you love, exactly as written.
Hide the ones that aren’t for your branch of the family.
Modify the ones you’ve made your own — with a note saying what you changed, so the original is always a click away.
Add recipes from your generation. New family voices, new dishes, same binder. They’ll be marked as new in your binder, attributed to whoever shared them with you.
Reorder. Maybe desserts come first.
Be forked yourself. Your kids can fork your binder. So can your nieces, your cousins. The recipes they keep will trace back through your binder all the way to the Original. Your modifications and your additions travel with them.

How to fork

The cookbook lives on Plinth. Forking a Plinth site is a single request. Open a chat with Claude and say:

Fork the Chester / Vestal Cookbook (chester-vestal-cookbook.plinth.page)
into a binder of my own called [your-name]’s Binder.
Keep all 124 recipes for now — I’ll curate from there.

Plinth will create a new site that descends from this one. All the recipes carry their lineage forward: origin: canonical, original_id: 31, contributor: The Original Binder. When you modify a recipe, your version gets origin: modified and a link back to the original. When you add new recipes, they’re marked origin: new and attributed to you.

When you publish

Tell us where your binder lives, and we’ll add it to the Binders page so the rest of the family can find it.

THE BINDER WAS ALWAYS A FORK. NOW THE FORK IS A BINDER.