How to turn family recipes into a printed cookbook

Every family has one: that recipe that has gone beyond being just a recipe into a treasured meal or food that no one can make quite like mom. Oftentimes, family recipes are shared by way of a stained index card with three ingredients and grandma's instructions of just adding flour “until it feels right,” or Uncle Joe insisting that the secret recipe in his award-winning chili is classified information, even though everyone knows it's probably Worcestershire sauce.

These are the recipes that are a beloved part of your family history. Turning them into a printed cookbook gives you an excellent way to preserve that history and heritage. Not only are you sharing the instructions for making Sunday gravy or sugar cookies, but you're keeping the stories, handwriting, photos, and details that would otherwise disappear along with the people who remember them.

If you want to turn family recipes into a printed cookbook, you're in luck. You don't need hundreds of recipes or a professional publishing contract to do it; just follow these steps:

Start by collecting everything

Don't start by deciding what goes in the cookbook and what doesn't. Start by collecting everything you can get your hands on. Ask family members for index cards, notebooks, clippings, handwritten notes and more. Yes, you may end up with six versions of the same potato salad, but that's okay, because you're putting together your family's culinary history.

Ask for photos, too. They don't necessarily have to be of the food itself, but a photo of your grandparents standing in the kitchen where Sunday dinners happened every week, will mean more in twenty years than a professionally styled photo of the roast. OnPress' cookbook printing can turn your collection of family recipes into a true keepsake with stories, memories, and recipes passed down from generation to generation.

Figure out how you want to organize the recipes

Once you know what you have, figure out how you want to organize the recipes. The obvious way is by category, like appetizers, breakfast, and holidays. However, given that it's a family cookbook, you could also organize it by person, generation, holiday and more. The most important point to keep in mind is consistency. Readers should be able to find Aunt Linda's apple cake without having to do a full-on genealogical investigation first.

Standardize the recipes without taking away their personality

Old family recipes often need a little translating. “Bake in a moderate oven” was something everyone understood before the 1940s. Your cousin's teenagers likely have no idea what it means. As you include the recipes, standardize the measurements, oven temperatures, ingredient names and instructions, so someone who never watched your grandma make her famous pot pie can still bake it.

At the same time, resist the temptation to edit out every drop of personality from the recipes. If your grandpa always called gravy “the sauce”, leave that in. If your mother's original card says DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN in furious capital letters, let that stay. You can make the instructions clear without taking away the voice of the person who made that recipe an unforgettable part of the family.

Add the things a recipe website can't

This is the point where a family cookbook becomes a treasured heirloom: include short stories. Who made the recipe? Where did it come from? Was it served every Thanksgiving? Did someone bring it to every reunion? You can even include handwritten recipe cards, old photos, menus, family sayings, or notes from the original cook.

OnPress also prints family history books specifically designed to preserve photos and records for future generations. Not every recipe needs a full page discussing its origin, but it's nice to give future readers some context as to why these particular recipes mattered.

Choose a cookbook size with plenty of room

Once your content is organized, think about the physical book itself. Cookbooks generally need more room than novels because they contain ingredient lists, instructions, photos, notes, and other design elements.

To help you make sure that your cookbook layout is designed correctly, OnPress offers several free downloadable book layout templates. Our sizes include both U.S. Letter and A4 formats which are specifically suitable for family cookbooks and our free templates work in both Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign.

Paperback or hardcover?

There's no rule etched in stone that says a family cookbook has to be hardcover. If you're printing a large number of copies for a reunion, family fundraiser or holiday gift, paperback can make perfect sense. Still, hardcover is worth considering purely for its durability.

If you're creating something that's meant to be enjoyed as a family keepsake, hardcover's ability to withstand repeated kitchen use is unparalleled. OnPress offers a number of specialty printing options, including recommendations for cookbooks.

Make sure photos are high quality

You don't need a professional food photographer to make every image of your family's recipes look flawless, but you still want a high enough resolution to make sure those same photos look good in print. We recommend images at 300 DPI, prepared for print use in CMYK rather than RGB format. We also require embedded fonts and clean PDF files without any comments or annotations. Learn more about how to prepare your family cookbook for prepress.

Print something worth passing down

Your family cookbook doesn't have to be an enormous, thick book filled with hundreds of pages of glossy photos. It can be simple and still be loved. What makes turning family recipes into a printed cookbook so memorable is that you're taking fragile index cards or slips of paper and putting them somewhere permanent.

Someday, someone who has never met the person who created the original recipe might stand in their kitchen and bake the same cake. They'll know whose recipe it was and maybe even a little anecdote behind it. And that's something you can't measure in either cups or teaspoons.