How to Digitise Old Handwritten Recipe Cards Before They Fade

Somewhere in your family there is a tin, or a shoebox, or an envelope at the back of a drawer. Inside it: index cards, torn-out magazine pages, backs of envelopes, a Basildon Bond letter with a cake recipe on it. Some of that handwriting belongs to people who are no longer here.

This is a job with a deadline. Pencil on card that's been in a hot kitchen for forty years is genuinely fading - butter, damp and sunlight have been working on it for decades. Here's how to do it in an afternoon.

Step 1: Get them all in one place, and don't rearrange yet

Gather everything. Don't tidy, don't sort, don't throw anything away - not even the ones that look like scraps. A shopping list in your grandmother's handwriting turns out to matter more than you'd think.

Handle them carefully. Old card is brittle at the corners, and sellotape from 1978 will take the paper with it if you pull.

Step 2: Photograph or scan every single one

Two options, and both work.

Phone photos. Perfectly good, and far faster than a scanner. Lay the card on a plain, dark surface, near a window, with the overhead light off. Hold the phone directly above it - square on, not at an angle - and fill the frame. Use a scanning app (most phones have one built into Notes or Files) which will straighten edges and boost contrast automatically.

A flatbed scanner. Better quality, slower. Scan at 600 dpi if you can, and save as a high-quality JPEG or a PDF.

Rules for both:

• Photograph both sides of every card. There is almost always something on the back.
• Get the whole card in frame, including any stains and scribbles in the margin. Those are part of it.
• Don't crop tightly. Leave the edges visible.
• Don't "clean up" the image so much that the handwriting loses its character.

The lighting principles here are the same ones that apply to photographing food on a phone: window light, no flash, no mixing daylight with bulbs.

Step 3: Name the files as you go

This is the step everyone skips and everyone regrets. Use a system like:

grandma-mary_christmas-cake_front.jpg
grandma-mary_christmas-cake_back.jpg

Whose handwriting, what the dish is, which side. Do it while you're photographing, not afterwards, because in three weeks you won't remember whose "Nut Loaf" that was.

Step 4: Back it up in three places, today

The whole point of digitising is that the recipes stop being one flood or one house fire away from gone. That only works if the digital copies aren't in one place either.

• On your phone or computer
• In cloud storage - Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, any of them
• On an external drive or a USB stick, or emailed to a sibling

Do all three before you put the cards back in the tin.

Step 5: Type them up

The photos preserve the object. Typing them up preserves the recipe in a form people can actually cook from and search.

Type them exactly as written first, including the vague bits - "a good knob of butter", "bake till done". Don't correct anything yet. That voice is worth keeping.

Then add a second layer underneath: your best guess at the missing information.

• What temperature, and for how long?
• What size tin?
• How many does it serve?
• What did "a teacup of flour" actually mean?

If anyone in the family still cooks the dish, ring them and ask - it's the single most useful phone call you'll make in the whole project. There's a full checklist of what a complete recipe needs in how to write a recipe.

Step 6: Cook the ones you're unsure about

Old recipes assume knowledge that has quietly disappeared. The only way to fill the gaps honestly is to make the dish and write down what you actually did.

Step 7: Keep the originals visible in the book

When you turn all this into a cookbook, don't throw away the scans. A photograph of the original card, printed alongside the typed-up version, is the most powerful thing on the page: a recipe you can cook, in the handwriting of the person who wrote it.

Common questions

What's the best app for scanning recipe cards?

Whatever's already on your phone. Notes on iPhone and Google Drive on Android both have a document scanner that squares up edges and boosts contrast automatically, and either is genuinely good enough. Downloading something specialised is a way of delaying the job rather than doing it.

Should I use OCR to convert the handwriting to text?

It's improved a lot but it still struggles with older cursive, faded pencil and abbreviations, and the errors it makes are the dangerous kind - a plausible wrong number rather than obvious nonsense. Use it as a first pass if you like, then check every quantity by eye against the image.

What resolution do I need if the cards will be printed?

Aim for at least 300 dpi at the size it'll appear on the page. A phone photo that fills the frame is comfortably enough for a card reproduced at roughly its original size. What ruins it is heavy cropping, or sending the image through WhatsApp, which compresses it.

Should I throw the originals away afterwards?

No. Digitising is insurance, not a replacement. Put them back in the tin, keep the tin somewhere dry and out of sunlight, and tell someone else in the family where it is.

What do I do about a recipe I can't read?

Photograph it anyway and file it. Handwriting that defeats you today is often obvious to a sibling, or to the person who wrote it, or to you in six months when you've read forty more cards in the same hand.