How to Make a Cookbook

October 13, 2010 7:27 AM

What do I use to make a cookbook?

My grandmother passed away earlier this year. She had a tremendous box full of recipes. As a nice remembrance for her I would like to make a cookbook of these recipes to give to all of my cousins/aunts/uncles etc. I have never done any sort of desktop publishing, and I am looking for a recommendation for a cheap (free?) program that I can use to do this.

I have an Intel iMac running OS 10.6.

posted by vansly to Food & Drink (11 answers total)

I don't know a computer program of the sort you describe. I used Word for a similar cookbook. However, I would strongly recommend that you obtain the book RECIPES INTO TYPE to use as a guide when composing and editing your cookbook. Cookbooks that are not edited and organized well are confusing and hard to use. This book may be out of print, but it is fairly recent and should be available from used book dealers.
posted by Jenna Brown at 7:32 AM on October 13, 2010

Check out MacGourmet. It's not free, but it's only $29, and is pretty good for recipe organization and then turning the recipes into a PDF cookbook you can print out.
posted by briank at 7:33 AM on October 13, 2010

Just this year I put together a document in Open Office, formatted it how I liked it (though fairly plainly) and published it with lulu.com. It's just under 300 pages and cost $16.43 shipped in a 6"x9" spiral bound book.

Spending a little time with your word processor's help files and learning how to do tables of contents and indexes (before you begin, since it's much easier to set it up as you go, telling it what parts of the recipes to index) will make a big difference. Lulu.com has templates available for various book sizes.

I have also used blurb.com for photobooks and been very pleased with their quality. They have a special program you use to put your book together that's very intuitive and easy to use. (The program is free.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:33 AM on October 13, 2010

We've had good luck with TasteBook. The interface is easy to use, the printing and binding are very nice, and the prices are pretty reasonable.
posted by jedicus at 7:35 AM on October 13, 2010

Consider Scribus, a free desktop publishing application. I have only a little experience with it (when I was toying with making a cookbook myself), but I do know it is more suited to your task than OpenOffice. There will be a steeper learning curve, however.
posted by whatnotever at 7:37 AM on October 13, 2010

In another direction: when my grandmother died and we did this, rather than typing everything up (which would have taken ages) we just organized the recipes by category (and sometimes there were multiple, slightly different recipes for the same things), photocopied them (several cards on each page) and collected them in a 3 ring binder. Part of what made it so special was seeing her handwriting on every page.
posted by ocherdraco at 7:49 AM on October 13, 2010

I've used Word with lulu.com for a family recipe book, it worked well.
posted by ldthomps at 7:53 AM on October 13, 2010

What about taking photos of the recipes and creating a photobook?

I'd imagine this is easier than typing out all the recipes - it would also preserve more of the character from the originals.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 8:07 AM on October 13, 2010

I'm trying out Inkubook. The interface is weird, but the price is good.
posted by torisaur at 8:23 AM on October 13, 2010

http://www.shutterfly.com/photo-books
posted by stealabove at 8:44 AM on October 13, 2010

As noted with ocherdraco - have you considered scanning them in as photos and making a photo book?
posted by maryr at 11:30 AM on October 13, 2010