Photograph your recipe cards. We transcribe, organize, design, and print them into one beautiful book your family will actually cook from, and we keep every handwritten card exactly as it is.
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Index cards in three different hands. A church cookbook with the spine broken at page 40. Something torn from a magazine in 1987. Your mother's handwriting on the back of an envelope, and underneath it, in different ink, a note she added later:
use half the sugar
It is not that organizing it is hard. It is that you cannot skim your grandmother's handwriting. You have to sit with it. So it stays in the drawer, getting more fragile, waiting for a weekend that does not come.
We do the sitting. You get the book.
You do the easy part. We do the tedious part.
Lay the cards on a table and take pictures with your phone. They do not need to be neat, straight, or good. Upload them in one batch. Would you rather mail us the originals? Mail-in scanning is an optional add-on, $69, charged separately. We send you a prepaid, insured box, scan every card, and mail them all back insured.
We read every card, transcribe the typed ones into a clean consistent format, standardize the measurements, sort everything by course, and place your handwritten cards as high-resolution scans. Then we send you a digital proof.
Review the proof, tell us what to change, and we revise. Nothing goes to press until you say so. Then it prints on wipeable coated stock, is bound as a hardcover, and ships to your door.
You choose the title, the illustration, the accent color and an optional dedication. The cover is a hardcover casewrap, so it looks like it belongs on the shelf next to the cookbooks you already love.
This is a real book from our own kitchen counter, not a mockup.
There is history in every one of these recipes, and we handle each kind of page with the care that history deserves.
Recipes that were already typed get rebuilt into one consistent format. Same fonts, same structure, same measurement conventions throughout, whether the original said "2 c." or "2 cups" or "two cups." Ingredients in a readable two-column layout. Numbered steps you can follow with flour on your hands. Every side note and margin comment comes with it.
Handwritten cards are never retyped. We clean up and enhance the photo you send, then place it on a designed page with a clean header, so it matches the rest of the book without losing a thing. The loops, the cross-outs, the coffee ring, the note at the bottom in someone else's pen. That is the part you will actually stop and look at in twenty years.
Every tier includes transcription, design, a table of contents, section dividers, and a digital proof before printing.
For a single collection, a shower box, one grandmother's cards, or a starter book you will add to.
For a real family archive, several sources, several hands, decades of collecting in one drawer.
For the whole thing, every source, every relative, bound in linen to sit on a shelf for fifty years.
Add-ons: mail-in scanning $69 · rush delivery in 10 business days $75 · additional recipes $3 each · gift certificates for when it will not arrive in time · digital PDF only $99
Every price includes printing and US shipping. Sales tax is added at checkout only for orders delivered in Colorado.
Already have your book and want another? Choose the same tier as your book, and check out with the email you ordered with so we can match it: Keepsake $59 · Heirloom $69 · Legacy $99. Not sure which you have? Write to [email protected] and we will send the right link.
"Retyping a handwritten card keeps the recipe and loses the person. So we never retype handwriting. We keep it exactly as it was written."Butter & Ink
That is normal and it is our job. We read carefully and, when something is genuinely ambiguous, a smudge that could be 1 tsp or 1 tbsp, we flag it and ask you rather than guessing. If nobody alive knows, we keep the card as a scan so the original is preserved and nothing is invented.
No. Phone photos on a kitchen table are fine for typed recipes. For handwritten cards that will be reproduced as images, better light helps, and we will tell you if any specific card needs a reshoot before we print. If you would rather not deal with it, add mail-in scanning, an optional add-on charged separately at $69, and we will handle it.
Yes, and the book is built for it. We keep your book file on record, so new recipes go straight into the right section, and the page numbers and table of contents update to match. Additional recipes added to an existing book are $3 each plus the cost of a reprint.
That is what it is designed for. Pages print on 80# coated stock, which resists splashes and wipes clean, and the hardcover protects it on the counter and on the shelf between uses. It is made to be cooked from, and it looks like it belongs on the shelf when you are done.
If you photograph them yourself, they never leave your house. If you add mail-in scanning ($69, charged separately), we scan and return every original by insured, tracked mail within five business days of receipt. We never keep or discard an original.
You tell us what to change and we change it. Nothing prints until you approve it, and you can have a full refund any time before it goes to press, no reason needed. After a book has been printed and shipped we will reprint any book with an error we made, at no cost.
Yes, it makes a wonderful gift. If you have the recipes in hand, order normally and ship it to them. If the recipes belong to the recipient, buy a gift certificate, they get a PDF by email within one business day, then upload their own cards whenever they are ready.
Three weeks from upload to doorstep for most orders, four for The Legacy. Rush service is ten business days for $75. During November, December, and the two weeks before Mother's Day, order early, since printing and shipping slow down in those weeks.
Take twenty minutes, photograph what you have, and let us do the rest. You will have a proof in your inbox inside of two weeks.
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