Most family recipes are not written down anywhere complete. Half of them are on cards in a drawer, some are screenshots in a phone, and a few exist only because one person still remembers how much butter it was. A family cookbook is the project that fixes that — and it tends to stall in the same two places every time.
The first place it stalls: collecting
Waiting until everything is gathered is how these projects die. Start with what is in reach: type in five recipes, photograph the cards you have, import whatever is already a file. A book with twenty recipes that exists beats a book with sixty that does not. You can always print a second edition — the file stays yours.
If relatives are contributing, ask for something narrow: one recipe each, and the one they would actually miss. Open-ended requests come back empty.
The second place it stalls: layout
This is where most people meet a design program and stop. It is not a design problem, it is a repetition problem — every recipe needs the same structure, the same spacing and the same treatment for a photo that is slightly the wrong shape. That is work a program should do, and it is what MenuTome does: one recipe becomes one page, chapters get openers, the contents build themselves.
You keep the decisions that matter. Which recipes go in, what the chapters are called, what the cover says, which photo belongs to which dish.
About the photos
Old family photos are usually fine at the size they are printed in a book. Phone photos of the finished dish are fine too. What does not work is a picture pulled off the internet: it is likely to be someone else’s, and it is likely to be too small to print.
Cover ideas that work
The ones that hold up are plain. A single dish photographed from above. A handwritten line from an original card, scanned. The family name and a span of years. What does not hold up is a collage — it looks busy at screen size and muddy at book size.
What you end up with
Two files: the interior and a cover sheet with front, spine and back. Print one copy at a local shop for a gift, or a dozen for a reunion, or put it on Amazon KDP if relatives should be able to order their own. Same files, your choice, and you can make that choice later.
Measurements and language
Recipes in cups and Fahrenheit, or grams and Celsius — the same page works either way, so a recipe written by one generation is readable by the next. The app itself runs in English or German, and the language of the book is chosen separately, which matters more than it sounds in families that do not all cook in the same one.
Free tier: one finished book of up to 15 pages, watermarked, on your own PC. The Amazon print package — interior, cover and the calculated spine — is part of the paid tier.
See also: Print your own cookbook · Spine width calculator · Cookbook maker for Windows
Auf Deutsch: Familienrezepte sichern — vom Zettelkasten zum Buch
Amazon and Amazon KDP are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. They are named here only to identify the service the exported files are set up for. MenuTome is an independent product and is not affiliated with Amazon.