How to make a family cookbook that keeps the stories with the recipes

A family cookbook is a family history that gets used every week. A recipe card in a grandmother's hand carries her name, the way she wrote, the dish she made for every Shabbos, and sometimes the town she learned it in. Many cookbooks keep the recipe and lose the rest. This guide shows how to keep both, from gathering the recipes with their stories to printing the book.

How to make a family cookbook, step by step

1. Decide whose recipes the book holds, and who will gather them.
2. Ask every household for its recipes and the memories behind them, with a date to send them by.
3. Copy the original cards and pages, front and back, before anyone cooks from them.
4. Sit with the cooks, or the relatives who remember them, and ask about each dish.
5. Test each recipe, and write it out with exact measures and numbered steps.
6. Write a short story for each dish and a page for each cook.
7. Photograph the dishes, and gather photographs of the cooks.
8. Arrange the recipes, write the dedication and introduction, and choose a title.
9. Lay out the pages, print one proof, correct it, and print a copy for each household.

Gathering usually takes a few weeks, and testing takes longest. A family that starts in the summer can have a book printed for Chanukah.

Gathering the recipes and the memories behind them

Choose one person to gather everything. Write to every household, on every side, and ask for two things together: the recipe as they make it, and what they remember about it. Ask for the everyday dishes as well as the special ones, since the plain weekday soup is often the one grandchildren miss. Set a date to send them by.

Recipes turn up on index cards, in old notebooks, in the margins of printed cookbooks, and in letters. Look for community cookbooks too. Shuls and their sisterhoods have long printed books of their members' recipes, and a grandmother's name may be in one beside her best cake.

How to save old family recipes

Treat the cards as family papers. Copy each one, front and back, before it goes near a stove, at a resolution good enough to print the card at full size, and name each copy with the cook and the dish. Keep the originals flat, in acid-free folders or sleeves of uncoated polyester, polyethylene or polypropylene, in a cool, dry room. What to do with old family photos and papers gives the details, and family heirlooms covers the other things a kitchen leaves behind.

Recipes that were never written down

Many of the best recipes were never on paper. The only way to keep them is to cook beside the person who makes them and write as they go. Measure what they use before it goes into the bowl: put the handful of flour on a kitchen scale, pour the "glass" of sugar into a measuring cup, and time each step. Record the session if they agree.

Questions to ask the cook

• Who taught you to make this, and where?
• What was it called at home, in Yiddish or another language?
• When was it made: every Shabbos, for one holiday, for a simcha, for someone who was ill?
• Has it changed since your mother made it, and why?
• Who else in the family makes it, and is theirs different?

Write down the names, towns and dates in the answers exactly. Questions to ask your grandparents has more questions for the same conversation.

Testing and standardizing the recipes

A recipe written for the person who wrote it often leaves out what she knew by heart, such as the size of the pan or how thick the batter should be. Before a recipe goes into the book, someone should make it from the page alone and note every question that comes up. Then give each tested recipe the same plain form: ingredients in the order they are used, each with an exact measure; numbered steps, one action to each, with times and temperatures; how many it serves and the size of the pan; and a note on anything that changed, with the cook's own wording kept beside it.

Old measures need turning into modern ones. A "glass" was whatever glass the cook used, so ask which one and measure it. Weigh flour where you can, since a cup can hold very different amounts: King Arthur Baking gives 120 grams for a cup of all-purpose flour and 198 grams for a cup of granulated sugar. For relatives in Israel or England, give metric measures beside the American ones.

Volumes and weights from the National Institute of Standards and Technology's metric kitchen table, checked October 2026. Oven temperatures worked from the formula: subtract 32 from the Fahrenheit figure, multiply by 5 and divide by 9.

The story of each dish and its cook

The story is what makes the book a family's. Give each dish a paragraph or two, in plain words: who made it, where it came from, when it was served, and one memory from someone who ate it. Quote relatives in their own words, and name them. For example: "Bubby Chaya Feldman made this lokshen kugel every Friday in Cleveland from 1948, in a pan her mother brought from Kalisz. She never wrote it down; her granddaughter Miriam cooked it with her in 2004 and measured everything as it went in."

Then give each cook a page, with a photograph, their dates and the towns they lived in. For some cooks this page is the only written account of their lives.

Relatives will remember the same dish differently. Print both versions, with who makes each: "Aunt Golda added raisins; Aunt Feiga said Bubby never did." The disagreement is part of the history.

Shabbos and holiday recipes as family tradition

In a Jewish family the cookbook often follows the year: Shabbos every week, then the holidays from Rosh Hashanah to Shavuos. A line on each dish's tradition tells a grandchild why it is made.

• Shabbos. Challah and soup on Friday night, and the stew that cooks overnight for the Shabbos day meal: cholent in Ashkenazi homes and hamin in Sephardi ones, called dafina in Morocco. It is put up before Shabbos begins, since no cooking is done on Shabbos.
• Rosh Hashanah. An apple dipped in honey for a sweet year, and honey cake. Chabad.org notes that some Sephardi communities dip the apple in sugar.
• Chanukah. Foods fried in oil, such as latkes and doughnuts, recall the oil that lasted eight days. Chabad.org notes that fried cheese dishes came first, and gave way to other foods where chicken fat became the usual frying fat, so that meat and dairy were not mixed.
• Shavuos. Dairy foods such as blintzes and cheesecake, a custom with several explanations, among them that the Torah is compared to milk.
• Pesach. A version of each recipe made without flour or leavening.

For Pesach, write down the family's own custom, since customs differ. Ashkenazi families do not eat kitniyos, such as rice, beans and corn, on Pesach, while many Sephardi families do, and many from Morocco follow the Ashkenazi custom. Ask your rav about any question of practice, and let the book record what the family did.

How recipes changed with the family

A grandmother may have used butter in a cake the family now serves after a meat meal, so the family version uses oil. A recipe from before a family kept kosher may need a note on how it is made now. Label each recipe meat, dairy or pareve, as the family keeps it, and write down both versions with what changed and when.

Ashkenazi and Sephardi family recipes

Give each dish the name the family used, with the usual spelling and a plain English description beside it, since the name is often the first thing a grandchild forgets. An Ashkenazi family's book may hold lokshen kugel, a baked noodle pudding; kreplach, filled dumplings; teiglach, small knots of dough boiled in honey; and mandelbroit, a twice-baked almond biscuit. A Sephardi family's book may hold its own hamin or dafina, with the spices of the town the family came from. Where a dish was learned in a particular town, say so.

For any family

The same method serves an Italian family's Sunday sauce or an Irish family's soda bread. Recipes that came with immigrants often changed in a new country, and the story of each change belongs on the page.

Photographs of the dishes, the cooks and the cards

Photograph each dish on a plain plate by a window in daylight, with the flash off, from above or from the height of the table. Add a photograph of each cook, at the stove or the table if one exists and otherwise a good portrait, and a copy of the original card printed at its own size, so that the writing can be read and recognized. Caption each photograph with who is in it, the place and the year.

Layout, and a template for one recipe page

Give every recipe the same page, so that a reader always knows where to look. A template:

A long recipe can take two facing pages: the story, the card and a photograph on the left, and the recipe on the right.

The order of the book

A family cookbook can be arranged by course, from soups to cakes, or by the year, from Shabbos through the holidays. Either way, open with a dedication, an introduction and a simple family tree of the cooks, and end with an index of the dishes and one of the cooks.

Family cookbook dedication page examples

• For Bubby Chaya, who never measured anything, and for her great-grandchildren, who now can.
• To our mother, Golda Weiss, and to every Friday night at her table.
• In memory of Mendel and Sora Katz, who fed everyone who came through their door.
• For the grandchildren, so that the kitchen on Maple Avenue is never forgotten.

Family cookbook titles

Plain titles last, such as The Feldman Family Kitchen, From Bubby's Table, Recipes from Orchard Street, or Our Family Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from Four Generations. The family name or a grandmother's name is enough.

Having a family cookbook printed and bound

A cookbook used at the stove needs to lie flat and survive spills. A coil binding lies flat and folds back on itself, and a ring binder lets the family add pages as new recipes come in. A book meant for the shelf is better as a hardcover, and a sewn hardcover opens flatter than a glued one. Some families print both: coil-bound copies for the kitchen and a hardcover edition for keeping.

A long cookbook usually costs less printed as an ordinary book than as a photo book. Printing a family history book compares bindings, papers and what copies cost.

The cheapest way to make a family cookbook

Type the recipes into one document, print it on both sides of the page at a copy shop, and have the copies coil-bound; a university print shop that prints family histories describes coil binding as inexpensive and durable. Share the same file with relatives far away, so that each household can print its own.

A blank recipe book to fill in

Some families give a grandmother a blank recipe book, bound in cloth or leather, to fill in over the years and pass down. It holds the recipes in her own hand, and it is the only copy, so copy its pages once it is full and keep the copy in another house.

Where to find heirloom cookbooks and recipe books

Look first in the family: a grandmother's recipe notebook, the printed cookbooks she used with her notes in the margins, and the cookbook of her shul. Community cookbooks have long been printed to raise money: The Settlement Cook Book, compiled in Milwaukee under Lizzie Black Kander to raise money for a settlement house that taught immigrants, went through more than forty editions. The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan has particular strengths in charity cookbooks and immigrant cookbooks. A local historical society may hold the cookbook of a congregation the family belonged to.

Sources: the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Metric Kitchen; King Arthur Baking's ingredient weight chart; the National Center for Home Food Preservation and university extension services on old canning recipes; Chabad.org on the apple in honey, the foods of Chanukah, dairy on Shavuos and kitniyos; the OU on kitniyos; My Jewish Learning and the Posen Library on cholent, hamin and dafina; BYU Print & Mail on coil binding. Checked October 2026.

Recipes as a chapter of the family's history

The names on the recipe cards and the towns the dishes came from are what the archives need. A researched family history can hold the recipes as a chapter of their own, with each card shown in the cook's hand beside her story and the record of her arrival. Zichronos researches a family in the archives that hold its records, then publishes its history as a finished hardcover book, and the family's recipes and the recordings of its cooks become part of it. What a family history book is sets out the kinds of family book, Inside a book shows one researched history page by page, what a family history book costs compares every kind of service, and How we work sets out the steps.