Every family has them. The lasagne recipe scrawled on the back of an envelope. The curry your dad makes from memory but has never measured a single ingredient for. The biscuit recipe your nan wrote on a card in 1974 that's been tucked into the same cookbook ever since, slowly picking up flour stains and splatter marks.
These recipes are irreplaceable. But they're also fragile. Paper fades, handwriting smudges, and the person who knows the recipe by heart won't be around forever.
Digitizing your family's recipes means they're preserved, searchable, and easy to share with anyone in the family. Here's how to do it with Recipe Shelf (if you're new, see
how Recipe Shelf works).
Snap a photo of the recipe
The fastest way to digitize a handwritten or printed recipe is to photograph it.
Open Recipe Shelf and tap Add Recipe, then choose Photo Upload. Take a photo of the recipe card, cookbook page, or printed sheet. Make sure the text is in focus and well-lit. Natural light near a window works best. Recipe Shelf reads the text using OCR (optical character recognition) and separates it into title, ingredients, and instructions automatically. Review what was extracted and fix anything the OCR got wrong. Handwriting is trickier than printed text, so expect to make a few corrections - especially for measurements and abbreviations. Save. The recipe is now in your collection.
A few tips for getting the best OCR results:
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Lay the recipe flat. Creases and folds confuse the text recognition.
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Avoid shadows across the text. Move the paper or adjust your angle.
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If the handwriting is very cursive or faded, you may need to correct more fields manually. That's normal.
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For cookbook pages, press the book open as flat as you can. The curve of the spine can distort text near the binding.
Type it in from memory (or over the phone)
Some family recipes aren't written down anywhere. They live in someone's head. The only way to capture them is to ask.
This is where manual entry comes in.
1.
Call your mum, dad, nan, uncle - whoever holds the recipe.
2.
Open Recipe Shelf and tap Add Recipe, then choose Manual Entry.
3.
Type as they talk. Fill in the title, ingredients, and instructions. Don't worry about getting it perfect on the first pass. You can always edit later.
4.
Ask about the details they take for granted. "A bit of butter" - how much? "Cook until done" - how long, roughly? "The usual spices" - which ones?
5.
Save it. Next time you cook it, you can adjust based on how it turns out.
This also works for recipes you know by heart yourself but have never bothered to write down. If you cook it regularly, take five minutes and get it into Recipe Shelf. Future you will appreciate it.
Copy from a family email or message thread
Sometimes family recipes get shared over text, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or email. They're buried in a conversation somewhere, and good luck finding them six months later.
If you can find the message, copy the text and use Smart Paste.
1.
Find the message with the recipe.
2.
Copy all of it. Don't worry about grabbing extra text like "here's that recipe you asked for!" or timestamps. Recipe Shelf's AI will ignore the noise.
3.
In Recipe Shelf, tap Add Recipe and choose Smart Paste.
4.
Paste the text. The AI separates it into title, ingredients, and instructions.
Share recipes with family members
Once a recipe is in Recipe Shelf, you can share it with anyone using a share link. They don't need an account to view it.
Start with the ones that matter most
You don't need to digitize every recipe at once. Start with the ones that would hurt to lose:
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The recipe only one person knows how to make.
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The recipe on paper that's falling apart.
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The recipe you always have to call someone about because you can never remember the quantities.
Even getting five or ten of those into Recipe Shelf means they're safe, backed up, and accessible from any device.
Get started
Recipe Shelf is free to use with up to 50 recipes.
Sign up at recipeshelf.ai and start preserving your family's recipes today.