How to make a family cookbook

How do you start a family cookbook?

Start by deciding who you are asking and by when, before you think about the book at all. A family cookbook is a collection problem, not a design problem: the part that fails is people not sending their recipes, and nothing about the binding fixes that.

Write the list of people first. Not "the family" — the actual names, with a way to reach each one. The list is usually shorter than you expect and it tells you immediately whether you are making a twenty-page book or a hundred-page one.

Then set a date and say it out loud when you ask. "Whenever you get a chance" produces nothing. A date three or four weeks away produces most of what you are going to get.

How many recipes do you need for a cookbook?

Twenty to thirty recipes makes a book that feels substantial and reads in one sitting. Below about fifteen it reads as a pamphlet; past about eighty most people stop cooking from it and start shelving it.

For scale: a recipe set one-to-a-page with room for notes underneath comes to roughly one page each, so thirty recipes plus a contents page, section dividers and a dedication lands around forty to fifty pages. Our own wedding book was 106 pages from 130 guests, which is a reply rate of about two in three and is what a well-chased collection looks like.

If you are short, do not pad it with recipes nobody sent. Ask five specific people for a second recipe instead. A book of thirty things somebody actually cooks beats fifty things scraped off the internet.

What do you do about handwritten recipe cards?

Photograph them and keep the photograph. A handwritten card is the best thing in any family cookbook, and retyping it into a clean font throws away the only part that was irreplaceable.

The practical problem is that a photograph of a card is hard to read at print size and impossible to lay out consistently. The usual answer is to transcribe the text for the recipe itself and reproduce the card separately, so you keep both the legibility and the handwriting.

If the person who wrote the card is no longer here, photograph it before you do anything else, at the highest quality your phone offers, flat and in daylight. That file is the archive whatever happens to the book.

What about recipes nobody wrote down properly?

Write down what the person actually says, including the vagueness. "A knob of butter" and "until it looks right" are how the recipe exists, and a family cookbook is the one place where that is an asset rather than a fault.

Where it genuinely will not work — a cake that needs real quantities — ring them and cook it with them on the phone. You will get the measurements and a much better note to print underneath than anything they would have typed.

Do not quietly correct somebody's method to the way you would do it. Half the point of the book is that it is in their voice, and they will notice.

How do you actually get people to send them?

Ask each person for one specific recipe rather than "a recipe". "Can I have your lemon cake" gets an answer; "send me a recipe" gets a nod and then nothing, because it makes the other person do the choosing.

Make it possible to reply badly. Somebody who can send a photograph of a page, a link, or four lines of text will reply; somebody who has to sit down and type a formatted recipe will not. Every barrier you remove is a recipe you get.

Then chase once, warmly, about a week before the deadline, and name the recipe again in the chase. There is a full script for this in the collecting guide.

How do you get a family cookbook printed?

You have three realistic options: print at home and bind it yourself, use a photo-book service, or use a service built for recipe books. The difference that matters is not price, it is whether the layout is done for you.

At home

Cheapest and slowest. Fine for ten copies of twenty pages. Laying out forty recipes consistently in a word processor takes far longer than anybody expects, and the binding is the weak point — a cookbook lives open on a worktop.

A photo-book service

Good paper and good binding, but the templates are built for photographs, so a page of text tends to come out with too little margin and type that is too small. Workable if you are patient with the editor.

A recipe-book service

The layout is the thing you are paying for: every recipe set the same way, contents and dividers generated, a proper hardback. Less control over the design in exchange for not doing forty pages by hand.

Whatever you choose, read the whole thing before you print it. A typo is a typo; a missing contributor is a phone call you do not want to make.

What should go in it besides the recipes?

A line from each person about why they chose their recipe, and blank space to write in later. The notes are what people read first, and the blank space is what makes it a book somebody adds to rather than a book somebody finishes.

A contents page earns its keep the moment the book passes twenty recipes. Section dividers — starters, mains, puddings — help more than they look like they will, because a cookbook is a thing people flick through rather than read.

A dedication at the front and a last word at the back turn a collection of pages into a book. They take five minutes and they are the two pages people stop on.

Questions

How long does it take to make a family cookbook?

Three to six weeks in practice, and almost all of it is waiting for people to send their recipes. Allow three or four weeks for collecting, a few days for reading it through, and one to two weeks for printing and delivery if you are having it bound.

How much does it cost to make a family cookbook?

Printing one hardback recipe book to order in the UK generally runs between about £40 and £120 depending on the page count, the paper and whether the layout is done for you. Printing at home costs less in cash and considerably more in evenings.

Can you make a family cookbook for free?

You can make and assemble one for free — a shared document that everyone adds to costs nothing, and a PDF can be read on a phone. The cost arrives only when you want it printed and bound as a physical book.

What is the best way to collect recipes from a lot of people?

One link that everybody uses, so nothing arrives in five different formats across three apps. The failure mode of email and group chats is not that people ignore you, it is that the replies scatter and you lose track of who has answered.

Should the recipes be tested before printing?

Read them for missing steps and impossible quantities, which are common and obvious. Do not cook all thirty. A family cookbook is a record of how these people cook, not a tested publication, and over-editing removes the voice that makes it worth having.

What size should a family cookbook be?

A4 if you want it to lie open on a worktop and be readable from standing height, which is how a cookbook is actually used. Smaller formats look neater on a shelf and are harder to cook from.