Photograph your recipe cards. We transcribe, organize, design, and print them into one beautiful book your family will actually cook from, and we keep every handwritten card exactly as it is.
Start your bookIndex cards in three different hands. A church cookbook with the spine broken at page 40. Something torn from a magazine in 1987. Your mother's handwriting on the back of an envelope, and underneath it, in different ink, a note she added later:
use half the sugar
It is not that organizing it is hard. It is that you cannot skim your grandmother's handwriting. You have to sit with it. So it stays in the drawer, getting more fragile, waiting for a weekend that does not come.
We do the sitting. You get the book.
You do the easy part. We do the tedious part.
Lay the cards on a table and take pictures with your phone. They do not need to be neat, straight, or good. Upload them in one batch. If you would rather mail us the originals, we will scan them and send them back insured.
We read every card, transcribe the typed ones into a clean consistent format, standardize the measurements, sort everything by course, and place your handwritten cards as high-resolution scans. Then we send you a digital proof.
Review the proof, tell us what to change, and we revise. Nothing goes to press until you say so. Then it prints on wipeable coated stock, binds to lie flat, and ships to your door.
This single decision is the whole product. Everyone else picks one and ruins the other.
Recipes that were already typed get rebuilt into one consistent format. Same fonts, same structure, same measurement conventions throughout, whether the original said "2 c." or "2 cups" or "two cups." Ingredients in a readable two-column layout. Numbered steps you can follow with flour on your hands. Every side note and margin comment comes with it.
Handwritten cards are never retyped. We scan them at high resolution and place them on a designed page with a clean header, so they match the rest of the book without losing a thing. The loops, the cross-outs, the coffee ring, the note at the bottom in someone else's pen. That is the part you will actually stop and look at in twenty years.
Every tier includes transcription, design, a table of contents, section dividers, and a digital proof before printing.
For a single collection, a shower box, one grandmother's cards, or a starter book you will add to.
For a real family archive, several sources, several hands, decades of collecting in one drawer.
For the whole thing, every source, every relative, bound in linen to sit on a shelf for fifty years.
Add-ons: mail-in scanning $49 · rush delivery in 10 business days $75 · additional recipes $3 each · gift certificates for when it will not arrive in time.
"I opened it to my mom's handwriting and had to put it down for a minute. You kept the part where she wrote ‘don't substitute the cream cheese' in the margin. That's the whole thing right there."Placeholder, replace with first real review
That is normal and it is our job. We read carefully and, when something is genuinely ambiguous, a smudge that could be 1 tsp or 1 tbsp, we flag it and ask you rather than guessing. If nobody alive knows, we keep the card as a scan so the original is preserved and nothing is invented.
No. Phone photos on a kitchen table are fine for typed recipes. For handwritten cards that will be reproduced as images, better light helps, and we will tell you if any specific card needs a reshoot before we print. If you would rather not deal with it, add mail-in scanning for $49 and we will handle it.
Yes, and the book is built for it. Page numbers run within each section rather than continuously, so adding a dessert later only affects the dessert section. We keep your book file on record. Additional recipes added to an existing book are $3 each plus the cost of a reprint.
That is what it is designed for. Pages print on 80# coated stock, which resists splashes and wipes clean, and the coil binding lies completely flat so it stays open on the counter without a hand on it. It is a cooking book, not a display book.
If you photograph them yourself, they never leave your house. If you use mail-in scanning, we scan and return every original by insured, tracked mail within five business days of receipt. We never keep or discard an original.
You tell us what to change and we change it. Nothing prints until you approve it. If we cannot get it right, you get a full refund before printing. After a book has been printed and shipped we will reprint any book with an error we made, at no cost.
Yes, and it is roughly half of what we do. If you have the recipes in hand, order normally and ship it to them. If the recipes belong to the recipient, buy a gift certificate, they get an instant PDF to open, then upload their own cards whenever they are ready.
Three weeks from upload to doorstep for most orders, four for The Legacy. Rush service is ten business days for $75. During November, December, and the two weeks before Mother's Day, book early, those windows sell out.
Take twenty minutes, photograph what you have, and let us do the rest. You will have a proof in your inbox inside of two weeks.
Start your book