How to Make a Family Recipe Book Worth Keeping

To make a family recipe book: collect dishes from every relative who cooks, sit in the kitchen and measure while someone cooks from memory, record the story attached to each dish, test every recipe with someone who has never made it, and print it in a format that survives being splashed. The recipes are the excuse. The stories are the book.

Family recipes are among the most fragile things a family owns, because they were never written down — everybody knew them, so nobody recorded them. Then one person dies and a dish that existed for a hundred years is simply gone.

Collect widely before you organise

Ask every relative who cooks, not just the obvious matriarch. Ask for:

• The dishes they make that came from someone else
• The ones they've changed, and why
• The dish they wish they could still make but never learned
• Anything associated with a holiday, a funeral, a birth or a departure

That last category matters more than it sounds. Food attached to an occasion carries the occasion with it, and those are the entries people will read rather than cook.

Cast wide: in-laws bring in whole other family traditions, and cousins who emigrated will have adapted dishes to different ingredients in ways worth recording.

Recovering a recipe nobody wrote down

This is the hard part, and there's only one method that reliably works: be in the kitchen while they cook it, and measure everything they don't.

Bring measuring spoons, a scale and a notebook. When they add "a bit" of something, catch it and weigh it. When they say "until it looks right", ask what right looks like — and photograph it. Time things they do by feel.

Ask the questions they'll never think to answer unprompted:

• What size pan, exactly?
• How hot, and how do you know?
• What did you do when the ingredient you actually want isn't available here?
• Whose recipe is this, and what did they do differently?
• What ruins it?

That last question is often the most valuable line in the entry.

Capture the story, not just the method

A recipe book of pure instructions is a reference document. What makes it an heirloom is the paragraph above each recipe: who made it, when it appeared, what it meant.

This is my grandmother's, and she made it every Friday from 1948 until the year she died. She learned it in a country that no longer exists, from a mother she never saw again after she was nineteen. She substituted the paprika because you couldn't get the right kind here, and she never stopped complaining about it.

That's the part your grandchildren will read. Our guides to interviewing your parents and recording a family member's voice work perfectly well applied to a kitchen table — many families find food is by far the easiest way into a life story, because it's a subject people don't feel self-conscious discussing.

Test everything

Every recipe should be cooked at least once by someone who has never made it, working only from the written version. Nothing else exposes the missing step.

You will discover that the instructions assume knowledge — a technique the original cook considered too obvious to mention, an ingredient prepared a particular way, a resting time nobody said out loud. Testing surfaces these while the person who knows is still available to ask.

Making the book itself

A few decisions that determine whether it gets used or shelved:

• Layout. One recipe per page or spread, never continuing over a page turn. Nobody wants to flip pages with wet hands.
• Legibility. Generous type size. The people most likely to use it are the oldest and the youngest in the family.
• Binding. Lay-flat binding is worth paying for in a book meant to sit open on a counter.
• Photographs. Photograph the cook and the handwritten original card, not only the finished dish. A scan of a stained index card in someone's handwriting is the single most affecting thing you can put in this kind of book.
• Copies. Print enough for everyone at once. Reprints later never quite happen.

Our guide to what to do with old family photos covers scanning and restoring fragile originals, including recipe cards.

Frequently asked questions

How do I write down a recipe from someone who cooks by feel?

Cook alongside them with a scale, measuring spoons and a notebook, and measure everything they add by eye before it goes in the pot. Ask what "until it looks right" actually looks like and photograph that stage. Also record pan size, heat level and timings, since these are the details experienced cooks omit because they consider them obvious.

What should go in a family recipe book besides recipes?

Include a short story with each dish — who it came from, when it was made, and what occasion it belonged to — plus photographs of the cook and scans of any handwritten original cards. Notes on substitutions made after emigration are especially worth recording, since they trace the family's movements through its food. These sections are what people read; the instructions are what they use.

How many recipes should a family cookbook have?

Between 30 and 60 recipes suits most families, which produces a substantial book without becoming a project that never finishes. It is better to include fewer dishes properly tested and fully documented than a hundred half-remembered ones. If more material exists, consider organising by branch of the family or by occasion rather than cutting.

What is the best way to print a family recipe book?

Choose a lay-flat binding so the book stays open on a counter, use a generous type size for older and younger cooks, and keep each recipe to a single page or spread so nobody has to turn a page mid-cook. Print enough copies for the whole family in one run, since reprints are rarely organised later. Hardback with a wipeable cover survives kitchen use considerably better than paperback.

If you'd rather not assemble it yourself

Collecting from a dozen relatives, standing in kitchens measuring what nobody measures, testing every dish and then designing and printing the result is a genuine project — usually a year of weekends.

We take on custom book projects of exactly this kind, including recipe and family history books: we do the interviewing, the writing, the photo restoration, the design and the printing. Have a look at our family history book ideas for what else is possible, or book a free consultation and tell us what your family cooks.