The cookbook was nothing, a stained club edition, and I only fanned the pages to check for water damage. The card fell out onto the table.
An index card, ruled, the blue lines faded and the red margin line still bright. Cursive, in pencil, slanting hard to the right the way a fast hand does. A recipe with no name at the top, just straight into it — flour, then a fat, then the crossing-out. Someone had written 1 cup and struck it through with a single line and put ¾ above it, and the ¾ was in the same pencil but a lighter press, added later, after the cup had proven wrong once. The card carried its own correction. Somebody had made this, tasted it, and edited the record so the next time would go better.
There was a grease mark at the bottom corner, gone translucent, so the light came through the card there as if through a small dirty window. A thumbprint, more or less. You could see the loops of it where the fat had held the ridges. This card had sat on a counter with something cooking. It had been touched by a hand that had just touched dough, and the hand had left its own recipe in the corner, the one nobody writes down.
The card was warmer to the hand than the book. Older paper. It had been kept between the printed pages the way you keep the real recipe near the useless one, the handwritten truth folded into the store-bought lie.
I put it back where it fell, closed the book on it, and set the book down. The corner of the card still showed at the top, sticking out a little, the grease spot catching the light.