How to scan handwritten recipe cards

Typing them all up is the obvious answer, and it is why the job never gets done — an evening per card is a price nobody pays. Photographing them is a price everybody pays.

Why a photo alone isn't enough

• A photo in your camera roll is a backup, not a recipe. It is better than nothing, but it is still not searchable, not scalable and not cookable.
• You cannot search it. Which of the 90 photos was the one with buttermilk?
• You cannot scale it. Aunt Jean's card makes 24 cookies and you want 12.
• You cannot shop from it. The ingredients cannot jump onto a grocery list from a JPEG.
• You need the words off the card and into structured text. That is the part AI is genuinely good at.

How to do it in ChefBook

1. Lay the card flat in good light. Daylight near a window beats a ceiling lamp. Flatten curled corners, and keep the whole card in frame — ChefBook shows a guide to line it up.
2. Photograph it in ChefBook. Use the photo import. One shot per recipe; if a recipe runs onto the back of the card, capture both sides.
3. Let the AI read it. ChefBook's AI transcribes the handwriting and works out which lines are ingredients and which are steps, producing a clean structured recipe rather than a wall of text.
4. Fix the quirks. Old cards say things like "butter the size of an egg" or "a moderate oven". Check the transcription and correct anything that reads oddly — this is the moment to modernise the vague bits.
5. Preserve the original. Keep the photo attached to the recipe. The handwriting is half the point; you want the data and the artefact.
6. Put it in a family cookbook. Collect them into a cookbook you can keep private or share publicly with your family, so the recipes exist in more than one place and more than one person's hands.

Do the emotional ones first

If you try to digitise the whole box in one sitting you will stop after nine cards. Do the five recipes you would be devastated to lose — the birthday cake, the Christmas stuffing, the one nobody else can make — and do them tonight. The rest can happen a card at a time.

Once they are in, they are searchable by ingredient, they scale to any number of servings, they translate into other languages for relatives who do not read the original, and they can go onto a grocery list with one tap. The recipes stop being relics and start being food again.