How to digitise a cookbook or handwritten family recipes

A recipe card in a relative's handwriting is one of the few things in a kitchen that can't be replaced. Neither can the cookbook that falls open at the page you always use. Both are easy to lose to a spill, a house move or a clear-out. Digitising them takes a few minutes per recipe, and means you can cook from them on your phone and share them with the rest of the family.

Which recipes to start with

Don't try to scan every cookbook on the shelf. Prioritise:

1. Handwritten family recipes. They're usually the only copy, and the handwriting is part of what makes them special.
2. The cookbook recipes you cook often, the pages with the splashes on them.
3. Loose clippings from magazines and packets that are already falling apart.

Step 1: take a good photo

A good photo makes everything after it easier, whether a person or software is reading it.

• Use daylight near a window, and turn off the flash, which glares on glossy pages.
• Lay it flat. For cookbooks, press the spine gently or hold the page flat with a clean hand out of frame.
• Shoot straight down, not at an angle, and fill the frame with the recipe.
• One recipe per photo. If a card is double-sided, take both sides.

On iPhone, the scanner in the Notes app helps here: it detects the page, straightens it and crops it for you. Apple's guide explains how to scan documents and text into Notes.

Keep the original photo, whatever you do next. For family recipes especially, the image of the card is worth keeping alongside the typed version.

Step 2: turn the photo into text you can edit

You have three main options.

Live Text on iPhone

Open the photo, touch and hold the text, and copy it. Apple's support page on copying text from photos covers the details and which iPhones support it. Paste the text into your notes or recipe app, then tidy it up.

Scan Text in Notes

In a note, the scan option can read text straight from the camera and drop it into the note, skipping the photo step. It's quick for printed pages.

A recipe app that scans pages

Some recipe apps take the photo and do the sorting too: separating the ingredients from the method, reading the servings, and saving it in the same format as your other recipes. That saves the tidying step, which is the slowest part of doing it by hand.

Step 3: check it against the original

Text recognition is very good on printed cookbooks and less reliable on handwriting, especially joined-up writing, faded ink or pencil. Whatever tool you use, check these by eye against the photo:

• Every number. 1 and 7, 4 and 9, and ½ and ¼ are easy to confuse.
• Units. "oz" and "g", "tsp" and "tbsp" are small marks with big consequences.
• Oven temperatures and times.
• Anything in the margins, like "use less sugar" or "Dad's version", which is often the most important part.

Step 4: decode old measurements

Older British recipes are often in imperial units and gas marks. It's worth adding modern equivalents next to the originals rather than replacing them.

Weights and volumes

A UK pint is bigger than a US pint, so if a recipe came from an American book or relative, check which one it means.

Oven temperatures and gas marks

Ovens vary, so treat the first bake from a converted recipe as a test and note any changes.

Step 5: keep the story with the recipe

A family recipe is more than its ingredients. When you save it, add a line or two: who wrote it, roughly when, what it was made for ("Nan's Christmas cake, always made in November"). Attach the original photo. In twenty years, that note will matter as much as the method.

Then back it up and share it. A recipe that lives on three relatives' phones is much harder to lose than one in a single tin.

A note on cookbooks and copyright

Copyright protects the expression of a work rather than the idea behind it. For recipes, the U.S. Copyright Office notes that a mere list of ingredients isn't protected, but an author's written instructions, photographs and the book as a whole are. UK law allows only specific, limited exceptions to copyright.

The practical takeaway: keep scans of published cookbooks for your own kitchen, and never post them online, share the files or print copies for friends. If you want to recommend a recipe, recommend the book. Your own family's handwritten recipes are a different matter: sharing those with relatives is exactly what they were written for. (This is general information, not legal advice.)

Doing this in DinnerSorted

Full disclosure: I make DinnerSorted. It can scan a recipe from a photo: take a picture of a cookbook page, a magazine clipping or a recipe card, and it reads the text and sets out the ingredients, steps, time and servings for you to check and correct before saving. The recipe then sits alongside everything else you've saved, searchable and editable, ready to go on your meal plan.

As with any scanner, check the quantities on handwritten cards. You get one free import to try it, and unlimited imports are part of DinnerSorted Pro, which has a free trial. It's iPhone only for now.