There are two ways to end up with a printed cookbook, and they are not the same product.
The first way is a printing service. You upload your recipes to a website, the site lays them out, and the site prints and ships the copies. It is convenient, and it has one consequence that only shows up later: the book lives on their platform, and every copy is bought from them.
The second way is a file. You build the book, you get the interior and the cover as PDFs, and then you decide who prints them. That is what MenuTome does.
What “the file” actually means
Two documents. The interior holds every recipe page, the chapter openers and the table of contents. The cover is a single sheet with the back, the spine and the front — the spine sized to the exact thickness of your book, which depends on the page count, the paper and the colour setting.
Both are ordinary PDF files on your drive. Nothing expires, nothing checks a licence when you open them, and no one can take them offline.
Where you can print them
At home, on a normal printer, if you just want a copy for the kitchen. At a local print shop, which is usually the right answer for ten or twenty copies for a family or a club — bring both files and say it is a perfect-bound paperback. Or through Amazon KDP, if you want the book to exist as a product other people can order. The interior and cover are already set up for that upload.
The important part is that the choice stays open. A book you built last spring can be printed at a shop this autumn and put on KDP next year, from the same two files.
What it costs to print
MenuTome does not print and does not sell printing. Whoever prints charges their own price. For KDP, the printing cost follows a published formula: a fixed amount per copy plus an amount per page, and the per-page amount depends on whether the book is black and white, standard colour or premium colour. For a colour cookbook, the page count is the number that moves the price — which is a good reason to know it before you design the book.
Amazon publishes the current rates on its own KDP printing cost help page, and it changes them from time to time. Look them up there for your own trim size and colour option rather than trusting a figure quoted in any guide, including this one — which is why no figure is quoted here.
What you need
A Windows PC. No account, no subscription to try it, and no internet connection while you work.
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: How to self-publish a cookbook on Amazon KDP · The spine width calculator · Cookbook maker for Windows
Amazon and Amazon KDP are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. They are named here only to identify the service the described files are set up for. MenuTome is an independent product and is not affiliated with Amazon.