How to Organise a Cookbook

You've gathered the recipes. There are sixty of them, they're in five different handwritings, and you now have to decide what order they go in. This is the step where most family cookbooks stall, because there's no obviously right answer and every option feels arbitrary.

First, lay everything out

Before you organise anything, get all the recipes visible at once. Index cards on a table, or a spreadsheet with one row per recipe: name, who it came from, what type of dish, roughly when it's eaten.

You cannot see the shape of a book while it's still in a folder. Once it's all in front of you, the structure usually announces itself.

Then pick one organising principle

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

A good compromise: organise by course, and use the headnotes and a "who it came from" line to carry the family story. You get a book that's genuinely useful and personal.

One exception worth knowing: a wedding cookbook built from two families is the one case where organising by person actively causes problems - it visually separates the two sides in a book whose whole point is that they've joined up. Organise those by course and note the source under each recipe instead.

Sort within chapters

Inside a chapter, don't just tip the recipes in. Order them so the chapter flows: simple to complex, quick to slow, light to heavy.

Put the strongest, most-loved recipe first in each chapter. That's the one people will open to.

Give every recipe the same skeleton

Consistency is what separates a cookbook from a pile of recipes. Every page should have, in the same place: the recipe name, who it came from, a short headnote, serves or makes, prep and cook time, ingredients, method, and notes or variations.

If a recipe is missing one of these, don't leave a gap - go and ask. There's a full checklist of what belongs on a recipe page in how to write a recipe.

Build in the finding

However you organise it, the reader needs to be able to find a recipe:

• A contents page at the front, listing every recipe with its page number.
• An index at the back, ideally two: one by recipe name, one by main ingredient. "I have a glut of courgettes" is a real way people use cookbooks.
• Chapter dividers you can see from the edge of the closed book - a coloured page, a full-bleed photo, anything.
• Running heads. The chapter name in the corner of every page so you know where you are.

Decide what goes either side of the recipes

The front and back matter is what makes it feel like a book rather than a folder.

Front: a title page, a short introduction (who made this, why, for whom), a contents page, and a family photo if you have a good one.

Back: the indexes, a few blank "your recipes" pages for whoever inherits it, and a page of conversions and oven temperatures.

Know when to stop

Sixty recipes is a book. A hundred and forty is an act of endurance that never gets finished.

Cut anything nobody actually cooks. Cut duplicates - you don't need four roast chickens, you need the best one with a note saying how the other three differ. Fifty recipes that all belong beats a hundred where half are filler.

The final check

Print it, or read it on screen cover to cover as if you'd never seen it, and ask three questions. 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 done. If the third one is a no, that's a layout problem rather than a structure problem - see cookbook design basics.

Common questions

What chapters should a cookbook have?

For a book meant to be cooked from: starters, mains, sides, puddings, baking, and a basics chapter for stocks, sauces and pastry. Six to eight chapters is the sweet spot - fewer and they're unwieldy, more and the contents page stops being scannable.

How many recipes should be in each chapter?

Roughly even, but don't force it. If you have twenty puddings and four starters, that tells you something true about the family and the book should reflect it. What you should avoid is a chapter with one recipe in it - fold that into the nearest neighbour.

Where do you put recipes that don't fit anywhere?

This is the strongest argument for organising by occasion - "feeding a crowd" and "when someone's ill" absorb almost anything. If you're organising by course, a short "odds and ends" or "the ones we couldn't categorise" chapter at the back is better than shoehorning them in.

Should the contents page list recipes or just chapters?

Every recipe, with its page number. A contents page listing six chapter names is decorative rather than useful, and it means every lookup becomes a hunt.