How to save your family's recipes before they're lost

Recipes disappear quietly

Nobody decides to forget their grandmother's mole. It just happens: the notebook goes into a drawer, the ink fades, someone borrows it and never brings it back. One day you want to cook that dish and discover nobody remembers whether it was three chiles or four.

That's why we built Cookbook4all: so your family's recipes live somewhere they won't be lost, ready to pass from one generation to the next. Creating your cookbook is free, and the recipes stay yours.

Three ways to capture a notebook you already have

1. Take a photo (the fastest)

If the notebook is within reach, this is the shortcut. In the new recipe form, tap 📸 Capture from a photo, point your camera at the page, and that's it: we read the title, the ingredients with their quantities, and the steps, then fill in the form for you. It works with handwriting too.

Then you review what we read, fix anything that needs fixing — family recipes deserve to be exact — and save. If you like, the photo of the original page stays with the recipe: the handwriting of whoever wrote it is still there.

2. Dictate it out loud

Open the form on your phone, tap the keyboard's microphone, and read the recipe from the notebook. Your phone types it for you. Handy when the paper is worn or the handwriting is hard to make out.

3. Type it

The classic way, and sometimes the best: as you type, you remember the details that aren't on the paper. "This is where my mom added a cinnamon stick." Those details are exactly what makes the recipe your family's, and not one from any old book.

Start with five

Don't try to digitize forty recipes in one afternoon. Pick five: the ones cooked on birthdays, at Christmas, when someone is sick. Those five are the heart of the cookbook. The rest will follow on their own.

And once they're saved

Your cookbook is private until you decide otherwise. You can share a single recipe with a link, invite your family to see them all, or publish them to the community so other families can cook them. You choose, recipe by recipe.

Shall we start? Create your free cookbook and capture the first one.