From Handwritten Recipes to Hardcover
Right before Christmas (2025), I got to work on turning a family’s collection of handwritten recipes into a hardcover cookbook.
The originals came in all kinds of forms — index cards, postcards, loose sheets of paper — collected and written on over the years. Each one was scanned and cleaned up while keeping the handwriting and all those little imperfections that made the originals feel like the originals.
A small part of the recipes that where scanned.
But we didn’t want to just dump a bunch of recipes into a book and call it done. We went through everything, sorted the recipes into categories, colour-coded the different sections, and built a proper table of contents so there was some actual logic to the book. We also went with a practical binding that made the pages easy to fold open while cooking.
As we went through revisions, the book started getting a little more personality too. The client added notes, jokes, and even a few “recipes” that weren’t really recipes at all. They were more like inside jokes about different family members — their quirks, likes, dislikes, and the kinds of things that probably only make complete sense if you’re part of the family.
There were a lot of revisions toward the end, especially with Christmas coming up fast, but we got the books printed in time.
I wasn’t there when everyone received them, but I was told they were a hit. the family ended up getting extra copies printed so everyone can hold on to a little piece of Nanny, and Poppa “the intermittent sous chef”.
And I think that’s probably the nicest part of the whole project. Everyone now has their own copy — a little piece of her, her handwriting, her recipes, and all the family’s inside jokes.
