Family recipe book: collecting, writing down, a recipe-card template and care of old cards

What is a family recipe book, and how big should it be?

A family recipe book collects the dishes your family actually cooks, with the people and the stories attached. It is not a cookery book in the shop sense. Nobody expects tested quantities from a professional kitchen. They expect the Sunday gravy that nan made and the biscuit that someone’s uncle burnt every year.

One way these projects stall is size. If you aim at “all our recipes”, you will never finish. Set a page budget first, and pick the recipes to fit it.

Thirty recipes is a good first target: 6 + 10 + 10 + 4 = 30. If one aunt holds twenty of them, the book is also a way of thanking her. To go wider than food, our family history book guide shows how to build a page plan for a whole family.

How do you collect recipes from relatives?

Ask for the dishes, not the recipes. “What did you always make for a birthday?” brings out more than “send me your recipes”. Then ask each person to name the three dishes they would hate to lose.

• Send one message to the whole family with a deadline and a simple list: dish name, who made it and when it was made.
• Ask for photographs of the handwritten cards, not retyped versions. The handwriting is part of the record.
• Offer to visit, since many people will not write a recipe down but will happily cook it with you.
• Keep a master list of what has come in and from whom.
• Agree at the start whether you will include recipes from the other side of the family.

Expect duplicates. Two cousins will each send “nan’s sponge” and the two will differ. Do not choose between them. Print both, with a note saying which cousin’s version it is.

Our guide to questions to ask grandparents has lists for the conversation around the food, which often goes further than the recipe.

How do you write down a recipe that was never written down?

Many family dishes live in someone’s hands. They say “a bit of this” and “until it looks right”. The way to catch them is to cook together with a notebook, a set of scales and a measuring jug on the worktop.

Ask what they do by sight and by feel, and write that down too. “Until the mixture drops off the spoon” is a perfectly good instruction if it is what they say. Add a measured amount beside it when you have one, so that someone who has never watched them cook can still follow the card.

This guide gives no conversion values for old measures or oven settings, because no UK source for them was read. If an old card uses a teacup, a cup or an old oven setting, copy it as written and add a note that you have not converted it. A cook in the family can then test it and add the modern figure.

How do you add the story behind each dish?

The story is what turns a pile of cards into a family book. It need not be long. Two or three lines are enough: who made this, when it appeared and one thing about the day.

Here is a template for a recipe card with a box for the story. It works for a printed page or a handwritten card.

The “Allergens” box is optional. It helps anyone who passes the book on or cooks from it for guests.

What do you need to say about allergens?

The Food Standards Agency publishes guidance for food businesses. It sets out 14 allergens: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites (above 10 parts per million), and tree nuts.¹ It applies to England, Northern Ireland and Wales and says food businesses must supply allergen information for every item that contains any of them.¹

The guidance is written for businesses. It does not mention home cooking, and this page does not say that a private family book is legally required to list allergens. As a courtesy, though, adding the allergens to each card is a simple way to protect a guest who has an allergy. If you plan to sell copies or give them away widely, check what applies to you before you print.

How do you organise and design it?

Choose one way of organising and stick to it. By course is simple and suits most families. By person is warmer: a chapter for each cook. By occasion, with a chapter for Christmas, one for birthdays and one for ordinary Tuesdays, is the most fun to read.

• One recipe to a page where you can, so a cook can lay the page flat.
• Use the same layout for every recipe: the card template above.
• Include a photograph of the cook or the handwritten card on the facing page.
• Keep fonts plain and large. A recipe is read with floury hands at arm’s length.
• End with a page of blank space for corrections and additions.

A binder is a sensible alternative to a printed book, since pages can be added when another relative sends a card in. It also means you can finish and share the book before every recipe has arrived.

Can you copy recipes from other books?

This is a question this page cannot fully answer. GOV.UK says copyright in written work arises automatically, with no fee and no register of copyright works in the UK.² The Intellectual Property Office also says fair dealing for criticism, review or quotation is allowed for any type of copyright work, with a sufficient acknowledgement.³

Whether a particular recipe is protected by copyright, and how far it can be copied, was not covered by the sources read for this guide. The safe route for your family book is simple: use your relatives’ own recipes in their own words, name the person each came from, and if you want to include a recipe from a published book, give the book and author and, where in doubt, ask the publisher.

How do you look after old recipe cards and papers?

Old handwritten cards are fragile, stained and precious. The National Archives has older general leaflets on caring for photographs and for prints, drawings and watercolours. They were not written for recipe cards, so use them as guidance only. Our family history book guide sets out the photograph advice in full.⁴

• Keep food and drink away from the originals.⁴
• For paper, touch it as little as possible, avoid damp cellars and uninsulated attics, and do not repair tears with commercially produced tape.⁵

A kitchen is not the best place for an original card, so photograph or scan it and cook from the copy. Put the original in a dry place away from the cooker, and keep the copy for the book.

How do you print and share it?

This guide does not compare printing or self-publishing services, because none was read. Whatever you choose, print one proof copy first and ask two relatives to read it with a pen. Check the ingredient lists with particular care.

Keep a digital master and a plain-text list of recipes in two places. If you want a different kind of keepsake, the memory book for grandma guide and the time capsule guide suit other occasions.

Where Memory fits

Chutex offers Memory, a service in preparation in which Aria, an AI, helps a person tell their life story, keeps the memories they choose to share and can prepare a book they review together. The service has its own page on this site: Chutex Memory. Memory gives no diagnosis. It is not a health professional and does not replace one.

The stories behind the dishes are part of a life story. Memory is one option for keeping them, and the recipe book above does not depend on it.

Frequently asked questions