How to Build a Family Cookbook (Digital + Printable)

Every family has a handful of recipes that nobody wrote down. Your
grandmother's braise. Your aunt's pie. The Christmas cookies your mom
makes every year from memory. When the person who knows the recipe
stops cooking, the recipe usually goes with them.

A family cookbook is the project that fixes this before it becomes a
regret. Here is how to actually finish one — digital first, printed
copy optional but worth it.

## Scope the project honestly

A "complete family cookbook" is the version that never gets done. Aim
smaller and you will actually finish.

Pick one of three scopes:

- **Core twelve.** The dozen recipes your household already cooks from
heritage. Weekend project.
- **One-generation book.** Everything your parents and their siblings
still cook. Weeks-to-months project. Manageable.
- **Multi-generation archive.** Great-grandmother's handwritten cards
plus modern additions. A year or more, and usually needs more than
one person.

Start with the core twelve. You can always expand. A finished
cookbook of twelve recipes beats a half-started archive of two
hundred.

## Gathering the recipes

Three sources, roughly in order of difficulty:

### Recipes that already exist in writing

Handwritten index cards, torn-out magazine pages, typed sheets, old
printouts. Collect them into one pile. Do not organize yet — just
collect.

### Recipes from memory

Call the person who makes it. Cook it with them on video call or in
person. Ask them to talk through what they are doing, measure as they
go, and correct you when you get it wrong. Expect phrases like "a
glug of olive oil" and "until it looks right" — write them down
exactly as said, and add your own measurements in parentheses next to
them.

This is the step most family cookbooks skip. It is also the step
where the book becomes irreplaceable.

### Recipes from photos and video

Old family videos often show someone cooking. Social media posts from
relatives are a goldmine. A photo of a Sunday dinner plate at least
tells you what the dish looked like.

## Digitizing what you have

Handwritten cards and printouts need to become structured data before
the cookbook works as a cookbook.

- **Cards:** photograph each one straight-on, good light, against a
white background. Import the photo at /import — the extraction
pipeline handles handwriting better than you think, and produces a
structured ingredient list and steps you can edit.
- **Printouts:** same flow. If the text is clean, extraction is fast.
- **Pages from cookbooks:** photograph the page, import it, and
attribute the original source in the notes field.

Keep the original image attached to each recipe. A scan of
grandmother's actual card, in her handwriting, is part of the value
of the book.

## Organizing the book

Family cookbooks work better by person and occasion than by
"appetizers / mains / desserts."

A structure that usually holds up:

- **By cook.** Grandma Rose's section, Uncle Miguel's section. Each
section leads with a short bio and photo.
- **By occasion.** Christmas, Passover, Sunday dinners, birthdays.
These are the memories the recipes anchor.
- **Everyday.** The weeknight recipes everyone cooked without
ceremony.

Tag recipes in your library by person and by occasion so the book can
reorganize later without retyping anything.

## Writing the headnotes

A family cookbook without headnotes is just a file of recipes. The
headnote is what makes it a book.

Three sentences is enough. Answer:

- Who made this, and when.
- One specific memory — the smell, the table, the argument about
whether to add dill.
- What to watch for when cooking it.

Example: "Grandma Rose made this every Rosh Hashanah in the brown
Pyrex dish that still lives in Mom's cabinet. The apples need to
almost collapse — if they still have shape, keep going. She used
more cinnamon than the recipe says."

## Making it printable

Digital library is the source of truth. Printed book is the keepsake.

For a small run (one to ten copies), two paths work:

- **Print-on-demand services.** Export the library to PDF, upload,
order hardcover. You will want to lay out the PDF with real margins
and readable fonts — 11-point serif, a good amount of white space
around each recipe, one recipe per page where possible.
- **Local print shop.** Better paper choices, more hands-on, more
expensive per copy.

If the library exports cleanly to PDF with images and headnotes
intact, the book is mostly done before layout starts. Check the
export options in settings or see /pricing for what is included on
each plan.

## Sharing with the family

A printed book is a gift. A digital copy is a living document.
Share both.

Invite family members to a shared collection so they can add recipes
they know that you missed. Family accounts let multiple people
contribute to the same library, and new additions propagate without
emailing PDFs around. See /blog/what-is-recipe-box for more on the
structured library this relies on.

## A realistic timeline

- Week 1: collect what already exists in writing. Photograph it.
- Weeks 2 to 4: call three to five relatives, cook with them, write
recipes.
- Week 5: digitize, tag, write headnotes.
- Week 6: lay out, proof, order a printed copy.

Six weekends. Twelve to thirty recipes. A real family cookbook, not a
half-started folder on a hard drive. The cooks in your family will
cry when they see it, and so will you.