How to make and print a family recipe book
To make a family recipe book, collect the recipes with the stories behind them, write them up with ChatGPT in the cook’s own words, and print them with Inkbind. A 21.6 cm square hardback is £42 and a paperback £34, delivered in about two weeks.
A family recipe book keeps the dishes that otherwise live in one person’s head, on a splattered card in the kitchen drawer or in a voice note from Nan. Everyone in the family has a use for one, from the cousin who can’t boil an egg to the one who’s been asking for the trifle recipe for ten years.
Collect the recipes
Ask the cook to talk you through each recipe while you record or type. Get the quantities, but also the stories: who it was made for, what went wrong the first time, which one always came out at Christmas. Those are what turn a pile of recipes into a family cookbook.
Old recipes often come in cups, ounces or “a teacup of flour”. Write down what was said, then weigh it the next time it’s made so the book can give both.
Write them up with ChatGPT
Paste your notes and ask:
“Turn this into a recipe with an ingredient list in grams and millilitres and short steps. Give the oven temperature in °C, fan and gas mark. Keep her words and put the story at the end; don’t make it sound like a magazine.”
Do one recipe per message so nothing gets tidied away. Then check every quantity yourself against the original. ChatGPT is good at tidying up and has no way of knowing that your gran always used a heaped tablespoon.
Family recipe book ideas
- Open each recipe with who made it and when: “Auntie Pat, every Boxing Day since 1983”.
- Keep the old measures (“a knob of butter”) alongside the exact ones.
- Add one photo per recipe: the dish, or better, the person making it.
- Group by occasion rather than course: Sunday dinners, birthdays, Christmas, things for when you’re poorly.
- Include the disasters. The year the Yorkshires didn’t rise is part of the story.
- Leave a blank page at the end for the next generation’s recipe.
Lay it out and print the family recipes
Once the recipes are in one conversation, ask Inkbind to make a recipe book from them, or paste them on our start page. Each recipe starts on its own page with the name as a heading and the ingredients as a list. A family photo works well on the cover. You see every page before you pay, so you can catch the missing egg before it’s printed.
Family cookbook printing: pages and cost
Books are 21.6 cm square and start at 32 pages; 15 to 20 recipes fill that comfortably. A hardback is £42 including delivery, and extra copies to the same address are £25 each, so you can order one for every household and hand them out on Christmas Day. Lulu prints UK orders in the UK. For Christmas, order by 3 December, or by 12 December with express.
If the cook is still with you, give them the first copy. Then watch them correct it.