How to Make a Cookbook

Making your own cookbook can help you gather all your go-to recipes in one place, or help you to preserve your family's history. Read on to learn how to make a cookbook.

There are many decisions to make when you are making a cookbook. You need to determine a theme, decide what recipes to include, and determine whether to make it yourself or send it out to be printed.

Although you may be tempted to include every recipe you've ever made, the cookbook will be more useful if it has a theme, and is organized. Think about why you're putting together the cookbook and select a theme which enhances your goals.

1. Family recipes can be organized by relative, by type of dish, or by country of origin
2. The cookbook could be organized by holiday or special occasion, including a section for everyday meals.
3. You could focus the cookbook on meals that are easy to make with children.

After you've determined how to organize your cookbook, you need to think about content. For example, if you're organizing by relative, but have 10 recipes from Aunt Martha and 9 from Aunt Jane and only 2 from their sister Paula, you'll want to beef up Paula's section by asking family members if they have any more of her recipes. If it's a holiday cookbook and you have 50 Christmas recipes and 3 Thanksgiving recipes you might be better off focusing on just Christmas.

Family pictures, maps from ancestral homelands, or copies of handwritten recipes can all be incorporated as visuals in your cookbook. You can also incorporate drawings and sketches your children did when they were young.

You can print out your cookbook on your computer computer, but that can be time consuming and expensive. A local print shop may be able to creat bound copies of an original draft for you, and there are also cookbook self-publishers which can do large quantities for a reasonable price.