How to digitize grandma's recipe cards (and keep the originals)

Why the cards are worth saving, not just the recipes

A typed recipe tells you what goes in the bowl. A recipe card tells you more. The handwriting is hers. The grease spot on the corner is from all the times she made it. The note in the margin that says "less sugar" or "Dad's favorite" or "double it at Christmas" is a piece of family history you won't find anywhere else.

Cards don't last forever, either. Ink fades, paper yellows, and a box can be lost in a move, a flood or a fire. One copy in a drawer is one bad day away from gone. The point of digitizing isn't to replace the cards. It's to make sure the recipe, and a picture of the card, outlive them.

Before you start: gather, sort and photograph

Set aside an afternoon, and if you can, invite whoever else in the family has cards. Half the fun is hearing who remembers what.

• Gather every card in one place, including the loose ones tucked inside cookbooks and the ones stuck to the fridge.
• Sort them into rough piles: mains, sides, desserts and holidays, or simply by whose handwriting it is.
• Set duplicates and different versions of the same recipe side by side. They're worth keeping, and comparing them is often where the best stories are.

Then photograph each card. You don't need special equipment; a phone is fine. A few things help:

• Lay the card flat on a plain surface that contrasts with the paper.
• Use soft daylight from a window rather than the overhead light or the flash, so there's no glare or shadow across the writing.
• Hold the phone straight above the card, with the whole card in the frame and a little space around the edges.
• If there's writing on the back, photograph the back too.
• If a shot comes out blurry, take another. It's much easier now than after the cards are back in the box.

Keep a picture of the card on the recipe

Whatever you use to store your recipes, the recipe and the picture of the card belong together. In Chefra, you can add several photos to a recipe, so the front of the card, the back, and maybe a picture of the finished dish can all live on the same recipe.

That way the typed-up version is easy to read and search, and the original, in her handwriting, is right there with it.

Getting the recipe into Chefra

Snap a photo of a recipe card, handwritten or printed, and Chefra reads the photo and turns it into a recipe you can edit. You can also import a recipe from a screenshot or from pasted text.

Read each recipe over once it's in, and fix anything that came through wrong. Handwriting varies, and shorthand like "c.", "T." or "a pinch of this" can trip up anyone.

If a card is faded, hard to photograph or hard to read, typing the recipe out and pasting the text in is the most dependable way. The same goes for a recipe that runs onto the back of the card. It takes a few minutes, and it's a good excuse to read each recipe slowly, the way she wrote it.

Keep her notes, and yours, in the cooking journal

Margin notes are the easiest thing to lose on the way from card to screen. Chefra lets you keep a private cooking journal on every recipe — note what you changed and pin the entries that matter.

Use it for both kinds of notes. Copy grandma's margin notes in and pin them, so "Dad's favorite" stays at the top. Then add your own as you go: the oven that runs hot, the extra lemon, the year the pie crust finally came out right.

Put them all in one cookbook

Give the family recipes a home of their own. Organize recipes into cookbooks with your own cover photo, then search, filter by tag, sort and bulk-manage what's inside.

A cookbook called "Grandma's recipes", with a picture of her kitchen or of the recipe box itself as the cover, is a lovely place to start. If you sorted the cards into piles earlier, tags are a natural fit for those piles.

Share them with the family

Recipe cards have a way of ending up with one person. Sharing them fixes that. Inside a Kitchen or Circle, you can post photos and recipes, comment, like, @mention members and search past posts. A family Circle makes a good home for the whole collection: post a recipe with the photo of its card, and let the cousins add what they remember in the comments.

For relatives who aren't on Chefra, you can share a recipe as a web link anyone can open without an account, as long as the recipe is set to Public or Unlisted. Saving it to their own Chefra needs an account.

And when it's time to make one, see how cooking from a saved recipe works on the cook along page.

Keep the originals safe

Once every card is photographed, put the originals back somewhere cool, dry and dark, away from the stove and the sink. Photo sleeves or an archival box keep them from sticking together and fading. Skip lamination and tape repairs; both are hard to undo. If more than one person wants the originals, the photos mean nobody has to fight over the box.

A quick checklist

1. Gather every card and sort them into rough piles.
2. Photograph each card flat, in soft daylight, with the whole card in the frame and the back too if it has writing.
3. Snap a photo of the card in Chefra to bring the recipe in, or type it out and paste the text if the card is hard to read.
4. Add the photos of the card to the recipe.
5. Copy her margin notes into the cooking journal and pin them.
6. Put everything in one cookbook with its own cover photo.
7. Share the collection with family in a Circle, or send a link.
8. Put the original cards back somewhere cool, dry and safe.

The cards were never only about the recipes. Keep them, and keep the recipes where the whole family can cook from them.