How to Make a Family Cookbook

Every family has an archive nobody has written down. Here is how to turn it into an actual book - the whole process, in the order you should do it, including the parts that catch people out.

Before anything else: decide what the book is for

This sounds like a step you can skip. It isn't, because it settles about six later arguments.

A book meant to be cooked from gets organised by course, has large type, and lies flat. A book meant as a tribute - for a grandparent's eightieth, say - gets organised by person, carries far more photographs, and can afford to be beautiful rather than practical. A wedding book has to hold two families at once and needs a structure that doesn't privilege either side.

Write one sentence: this book is for ___ so that they can ___. Keep it where you can see it. Every time you're stuck on a decision, that sentence answers it.

Step 1: Gather the recipes

Start wider than you think you need to, because you will lose perhaps a third along the way - duplicates, things nobody actually cooks, and recipes that turn out to be a page torn from a magazine in 1994.

Ask for more than the recipe. Ask who taught them, when they make it, and what goes wrong. That's the material that makes the book worth reading rather than just worth using.

The bottleneck here is human, not technical. People take a fortnight to reply, then send a photograph of a card in handwriting you can't read. Two things help: give everyone a deadline earlier than your real one, and let people write their own entries rather than dictating them to you. A recipe in someone's own words is almost always better than your tidied-up version of it.

Step 2: Rescue the handwritten originals

Somewhere there is a tin, a shoebox, or an envelope at the back of a drawer. Some of that handwriting belongs to people who are no longer here, and pencil on card that's lived in a hot kitchen for forty years is genuinely fading.

Photograph both sides of every card before you do anything else with them, name the files as you go, and back the images up in three places the same day. A scan of the original card, printed next to the typed-up version, ends up being the most powerful thing on the page - you get a recipe you can cook and the handwriting of the person who wrote it.

Full method, including the file-naming system and what to do with recipes that say "bake till done": how to digitise old handwritten recipe cards.

Step 3: Write each recipe so a stranger could cook it

This is where most family cookbooks quietly fail. Someone writes down a dish they've made two hundred times, and because they've stopped noticing what they do, half the information never makes it onto the page. No oven temperature. No tin size. "A knob of butter." "Cook until done."

The fix is to cook the dish and write while you cook - weighing things you'd normally eyeball, timing things you'd normally judge. Then hand it to someone who's never made it and watch them cook it without helping. Every pause is a missing line.

The full process, plus a checklist of the details people leave out - yield, split timings, fan versus conventional, resting times, and the one point in every recipe where it can go wrong: how to write a recipe.

Step 4: Take the photographs

You do not need a camera and you do not need a photo for every recipe. If you're taking the photos yourself, almost all of it comes down to light: turn off the overhead bulb, put the plate next to a window, keep the light to the side or behind the food rather than behind you, and never use the flash. Shoot everything by the same window with the same edit and the whole set will hang together.

If relatives are sending photos in, don't worry about making them match. A contributor's own snapshot - the dish on their table, in their kitchen - carries the memory with it, and in a family cookbook that's worth more than a matched set.

Full guide: how to take food photos on your phone.

Step 5: Choose one organising principle

The mistake is using several at once. Pick one and let everything else be a sub-level.

If you can't decide, organise by course and carry the family story in a "who it came from" line under each title. You get a book that's genuinely useful and personal. More on chapter order, sorting within chapters and knowing when to stop: how to organise a cookbook.

Step 6: Lay it out consistently

The difference between a book that looks homemade and one that looks real isn't money or talent. It's a small number of decisions applied without deviation: two fonts, generous margins, one recipe per page or per spread, everything aligned to the same grid, body type big enough to read at arm's length on a worktop.

Build one recipe page you're happy with, then treat it as a template and never depart from it. Readers don't consciously notice consistency - they notice its absence.

The seven decisions that do most of the work: cookbook design basics.

Step 7: Add the furniture

A book without navigation is a pile of paper. Before it goes to print it needs a title page, a short introduction saying who made it and why, a contents page, chapter dividers you can see from the edge of the closed book, running heads, page numbers on every page, and an index at the back - ideally two, one by recipe name and one by main ingredient. "I have a glut of courgettes" is a real way people use cookbooks.

Leave a few blank pages at the back for whoever inherits it. It's a small thing and it's the detail people mention most.

Step 8: Print it properly

The decisions that matter at this stage, roughly in order of how much people regret getting them wrong:

• Binding. Is it bound professionally? Good cookbook bindings are durable to survive use in a kitchen.
• Paper weight. Thin paper shows the photo on the reverse through the page.
• Finish. Matt hides fingerprints and splashes; gloss makes photographs sing. In a kitchen, matt usually wins.
• Copies. Order one more than you think. Someone always asks.

Then do the final check: read it cover to cover as if you'd never seen it. Could a stranger cook any recipe in here without ringing you? Can you find a pudding in under ten seconds? Does every page look like it belongs in the same book? Three yeses and you're finished.

How long it actually takes

If it's a present, work backwards from the occasion and add a fortnight of slack. Christmas books should start in early November for exactly this reason.

Common questions

How many recipes should a family cookbook have?

Fifty to sixty is a book; much past a hundred and the project tends to stall before it's printed. Cut anything nobody actually cooks, and where several people sent the same dish, pick the best version and note the variations under it.

Can I include recipes from published cookbooks?

Lists of ingredients aren't protected by copyright, but the written method and any surrounding text are. If a dish came from a published book, rewrite the method in your own words and credit the source - "adapted from…" - rather than copying it across. For a book you're printing a handful of copies of for your own family this is mostly a courtesy question, but it's the right way to do it.

What's the best way to collect recipes from lots of relatives?

Don't do it by email and don't retype forty cards yourself. Give people somewhere to enter their own recipe directly, set a deadline two weeks before your real one, and chase once. Letting people write in their own voice is also better content - the version an aunt writes herself is nearly always more characterful than your tidied-up version.

Should I write the recipes in metric or imperial?

Metric, with weights rather than cups, because it's the only honest unit for baking. If the original card says "a teacup of flour", keep that line as written for character and put the gram weight underneath. Add a conversions page at the back and everyone's happy.

Is it worth making a family cookbook if I'm not a designer?

Yes - consistency matters far more than flair, and consistency is a decision rather than a skill. If you don't want to build a template from scratch, use one that's already been designed and put your effort into the recipes and the writing, which is the part nobody else can do.