Digitising family recipes (cards, clippings and grandma’s notebook)

Recipe cards are the most-loved, worst-preserved documents in any family — handwritten, sauce-stained, singular. Scanning them is genuinely moving work: the handwriting is half the recipe.

Scanning the formats

• Index cards: dark background, close framing; front and back when notes continue (Add page).
• Notebook pages: the handwriting technique — press flat, light along the binding.
• Clippings: mount loose newspaper clippings on a contrasting sheet to scan; yellowed paper enhances surprisingly well.
• Stains stay: honestly, keep them — the gravy mark on the gravy recipe is provenance.

Organising the collection

1. One PDF per recipe (card + back + variations), named “Recipe-{Dish}-{Author}.pdf” — “Recipe-Biryani-Umma.pdf”.
2. Or chapter-PDFs by course for a cookbook feel (up to 20 pages each).
3. Share the folder with the family — the whole point — and invite corrections and additions.

The gift version

Collect the scans into printed books (any photo-book service prints PDFs' pages) for weddings and milestone birthdays: grandma's handwriting, everyone's kitchen. Few scanning projects have this return on an afternoon.

Frequently asked questions

Should I also type the recipes out?

Typed copies are searchable and cook-friendly; scans preserve the artefact. Do scans first (fast, complete), transcribe favourites gradually — the scan is the backup for the transcription.

Ingredients in old measurements or other languages?

Scan faithfully, annotate in the file name or a companion note. Never overwrite the original’s content — that’s someone’s memory.