How to Make a Family Cookbook With Your Old Family Recipes

Cookbooks—especially family and community cookbooks—can be rich sources of genealogical information. But more than that, they share your family’s story in a way other documents can’t. By preserving and re-creating your family’s food traditions, you evoke not just a sense of sight but also that of taste and smell.

As with other family history projects, you’ll need to make several decisions as you try to create a family cookbook: what to include, how to publish, and if it will have a theme, for starters.

Fortunately, you have a wide range of options. This article covers the six steps (and several “ingredients”) that lead to family culinary success: publishing a heritage recipe cookbook that will grace the kitchens of generations to come.

1. Pick a Theme

Ingredients: Purpose, creativity (to taste)

All good books—about cooking or otherwise—have a concrete purpose. Besides preserving recipes, what do you hope your book will accomplish? Possibilities include:

• Marking a family reunion or milestone event (such as a wedding anniversary)
• Serving as a holiday gift for family members
• Memorializing a specific family line
• Telling a family story
• Preserving family cultural or ethnic traditions

From the purpose springs a theme: holiday favorites, recipes of a particular family line, etc. That theme will dictate what materials you include (recipes as well as other items), how to format it, and how many copies you’ll print.

2. Find Family Recipes

Ingredients: Old recipe cards, family interviews, historical publications (as needed)

Family food traditions abound—not just in annual holiday dishes, also the everyday family dinner fare or summertime snack. Think back to what you ate as a kid—and what you and your family eat today. Are there particular food-related memories that stand out?

You likely have some heritage recipes in your possession: stained recipe cards received from a mother or grandmother, a memorized list of steps given to you by an uncle, or a signature dish you’ve developed yourself over the years. If you’re lucky, you even have a cookbook made by a member of a previous generation.

But it’s worth looking more broadly for recipes. Perhaps someone else in the family inherited a recipe, or you want to flesh out or confirm the details of one you’ve already curated.

Family members

Ask not just immediate family members, but also aunts, uncles and cousins. Reach out via email or post a question on Facebook. You never know who has the information until you ask—a simple Facebook post prompted a cousin to send me my maternal grandmother’s recipes. As per usual when tapping family sources, start by interviewing older relatives (who were more likely to know the older generations).

Spend time asking family about their memories of the food, not just the recipes themselves. Everyone’s memories of Grandma, family dinners, and treasured dishes are different—maybe you remember the Thanksgiving pie, but your cousin remembers the stuffing. Even if they don’t have the specifics of a recipe, your relatives might still have information that adds rich details to your cookbook or points you in the right direction.

You could even host a family potluck dinner and invite family members to bring their favorite dishes (along with the recipes).

Community cookbooks

Charities, churches and other nonprofits may have published cookbooks as fundraisers. Usually curated by members of those organizations (who were likely amateur publishers), the books were sometimes comb-bound. But others may have been hardback, coil-bound or even stapled at the spine.

Look for community cookbooks—which provide a glimpse into the culinary history of a group as well as individual families—in library catalogs, digitized book websites, and online auctions such as eBay. Expand your search to local libraries, used book stores, and thrift stores.

Search the web for a cookbook of interest using the subject heading cookery or cookbooks. You might also try phrases that incorporate organizations (e.g., church cookbook) or religious denominations (Methodist cookbook).

In particular, WorldCat is an online catalog to thousands of institutions, and Google Books hosts many public-domain books available for download. Another notable resource is the Internet Archive, which has a Text collection and subcollection “Cookbooks and Home Economics.”

Contemporary published cookbooks

Even if they’re not about your family or their community, cookbooks published during your ancestor’s lifetime might include a recipe similar to the one you’re looking for. Some academic or public libraries have culinary collections, including Texas Woman’s University.

Don’t ignore the possibility that a beloved family recipe actually originated from a well-known cookbook. Some standards through the generations include:

• The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph (1824; available at Google Books)
• The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer (1896; available through Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project
• The Settlement Cookbook by Mrs. Simon Kander (née Elizabeth Black, 1903; available at Google Books)
• The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer (1931; still in print), famously studied by TV cooking icon Julia Child
• Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (1950; still in print)

Newspapers

Historical newspapers are the perfect place to find recipes. In the 1890s, “Women’s Pages” start appearing in big-city newspapers. Here, home economics experts and community members shared recipes and cooking techniques.

Search an online database of newspapers for the name of the recipe or a similar dish. Narrow results to only the time periods you’re interested in. (Some recipe columns were syndicated across multiple newspapers, so you might not want to narrow by place.)

Recipe websites

Mega-websites include Allrecipes, Taste of Home and America’s Test Kitchen. Users have also saved recipes galore on social media platforms, especially Pinterest.

3. Gather Other Materials

Ingredients: Photos, family stories, genealogical forms, scanner and/or printer

Yes, cookbooks often have more than recipes. Possible additions include:

• Written stories about each recipe
• The names of contributors and any relationship to a common ancestor or other family member
• Photos of family members (especially contributors), gatherings or heirlooms
• Pedigree charts, family group sheets, and other genealogy forms
• Images of historic recipe cards and/or other documents

Your theme will guide what else you should collect. For example, a cookbook of holiday recipes might include photos of family gatherings, milestone events (babies’ first Christmases, families around the tree on Christmas morning), ugly sweaters, in-progress traditions, and typical decorations.

Make sure all your materials are in a preferred format: print for cookbooks you’ll be assembling by hand, or digital if you’ll be designing the book online and having it printed. You’ll need printouts of all materials or high-quality scans, respectively.

4. Select, then Rewrite Recipes

Ingredients: New acid-free notecards or sheet paper, archival-safe pen or no. 2 pencil

Now that you’ve collected all these recipes, your next step is deciding which to include. You may have just a few recipes or too many to handle—both come with their own challenges.

One factor to consider: Recipes are products of their time and the family’s circumstances. They evolved in response to food availability, the family’s economic status, cultural forces, and cooking fads. As a result, in addition to theme (see No. 1), you should consider the following when selecting recipes for your book:

• Tastes change over time: Earlier generations had different definitions of “good food” than we do today. Historical dishes might today be bland or otherwise unappealing—for example, mid-century aspic and gelatin salad recipes that combine meats and vegetables that we don’t typically mix today.
• Ingredients change over time: In general, spices and seasonings weren’t as popular in the early 20th century, and vegetables tended to be overcooked. Likewise, dishes from the 1950s might seem too salty today.

It’s great to add those historical recipes. But if you want your cookbook to be used by family cooks, you’ll want to include recipes that people will want to eat. You might omit certain recipes, or tweak them to make them more palatable.

Once you’ve chosen your recipes, make sure they’re clearly written and easy to read. That may mean rewriting cards that are smudged, faded, written with poor penmanship, or otherwise hard to read. You might choose to rewrite all the recipes so they have a consistent appearance. Make sure you scan the originals, then safely store them or preserve them in another fun way.

Recipes have a kind of template, notably include a title, a list of ingredients, and cooking instructions. Other elements could include:

• Number of people the recipe serves
• Equipment needed
• Preparation and cooking time(s)
• The recipe’s known origin: who first introduced it, and who passed it along to the author
• Notes from either the recipe’s creator or the cookbook author
• A story describing who created the recipe, why it was important, and when it was used

Let’s break down the three main parts of the recipe step-by-step.

Title

Family recipes may or may not have existing names. They’re usually named after an ingredient (Lemon Blueberry Scones) or cooking process (BBQ Chicken), or after a specific family member (Grandma Chatham’s Peanut Butter Cookies). Some recipe titles have no meaning—my family, for example, has a Jell-O salad called Pink Stuff. Devise your own name if necessary and add a comment at the bottom of the recipe explaining it.

Ingredients

This might seem like the easiest part. After all, you’re just writing a list of grocery items.

However, many recipes adhere to a handful of conventions that make them easy to follow:

• Write ingredients in the order they’re used. If a step has multiple ingredients, list the most-important first. Indicate any details about the ingredient (boiled, roasted, diced, etc.), but place the ingredient’s name first—for example, “3 eggs, beaten” instead of “3 beaten eggs.”
• Spell out abbreviations unless they’re commonly understood (tsp for teaspoon, for example). You could add your own abbreviations for ingredients that appear throughout the cookbook—just make sure you include a key. Learn how to interpret old measurement systems here.
• Capitalize the first letter of ingredients that don’t have an associated number (e.g., “Salt to taste”).
• Watch out for sets of numbers: To avoid confusion, write out the last number when an ingredient has two associated figures (e.g., “2 five-once jars”).

These best practices not only make recipes easier to ready, but also prevent misunderstandings. You don’t want someone to inadvertently make the wrong dish!

Instructions

These are perhaps the most important parts of a recipe, separating a simple collection of ingredients from a well-loved family dish. Follow these tips for writing instructions:

• Be explicit. Assume the reader has very little knowledge of what the finalized dish should look like. Could they really make the food based solely on your directions?
• Be precise. Make sure you use specific language for cooking techniques: stir, bake, baste, dice, quarter, chop, mince, and so on. (Online cookbooks can help.)
• Order steps chronologically. This includes preheating ovens.
• Mention all the ingredients: Even if salt and pepper (for example) are to be added “to taste,” make sure you mention them in a step. If an ingredient is used in multiple steps, indicate how much is used each time (e.g., “1 egg white; save yolk for egg wash”).

5. Organize Your Pages

Ingredients: Materials for a “storyboard”—paper, pen, sticky notes, or index cards

Before you try to actually design your cookbook, sketch out how you’d like it to be ordered. Creatives use storyboards for such long-form products like books or TV shows: a quick outline of a work’s sections.

Cookbooks are generally organized by food type. Common “chapters” include:

• Appetizers
• Beverages
• Breads and Rolls
• Entrées (or Main Dishes)
• Side Dishes
• Soups and Salads
• Vegetables
• Desserts

You might subdivide larger sections—for example, splitting Main Dishes into Meat and Vegetarian.

6. Design and Print Your Cookbook

Ingredients: Basic document-design software (Microsoft Word or equivalent), book-printing platform

Now it’s time to actually assemble the cookbook. Unlike other family history books, cookbooks have a fairly standard format. As discussed earlier, you won’t likely need to spend much time thinking about the design of individual pages—recipes can be templated and designed using simple word-processing tools such as Microsoft Word or Scrivener.

However, you should think about what you want the book’s exterior to look like. Most cookbooks are actively used in the kitchen, so they have to be durable and easy to reference. That might mean they have heavier paper to stand up to repeated use, covers that are easy to clean after a spill, or “lay-flat” binding for hands-free reference. Think about your own favorite cookbooks or those in a local bookstore—what do you like and dislike about their format?

These questions will help you decide which is the best fit for you:

• Who is the audience for this cookbook? How many copies will you need?
• Will people outside your “core” audience be interested? For example, would a genealogical society?
• Will you finance the cookbook yourself? Or will you charge for copies or ask for donations to help cover printing costs?
• Will you “inventory” the book so you have more copies to distribute?
• Do you plan to sell the book “print on demand” on a website?

Your resources—both in terms of time and money—will likely dictate how you answer these questions. Closer-to-home options will likely be cheaper but require more work. By comparison, professional or DIY book-publishers cost more but give you more tools, formats, and design options.

You may find that a home-office printer and stapler or three-hole punch will get the job done. But family historians have an abundance of book-publishing services these days. In fact, some publishers specialize in cookbooks. Morris Press is probably the best-known, offering recipe templates, format consultations, and even a shop where family members can purchase copies. Heritage Cookbook is another.

Other general DIY book-publishers include Amazon and Lulu; Maureen A. Taylor covers some of them here. You might also consider digital book-creation services: Shutterfly, Snapfish, MyCanvas, etc.

A cookbook preserves a treasured part of your family’s history and allows it to be referred to again and again. Get started this holiday season to make the perfect one for your next reunion.

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A version of this article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Family Tree Magazine. A similar article was published online by Rachel Christian in May 2019.