A family cookbookthe recipe box, the stories behind it and an index of the family who cooked it

Method

1. 1

   Make the shelf and the chapters

   Make a shelf called The Halloran kitchen (use your own family’s name) and say in a line what it is for: “Recipes from Nana Rose’s box, and the people who cooked them.” Decide the chapters before anything is filed. Five is a good number to start with: Breakfasts, Weeknights, Sundays, Holidays, Baking. You can always move a recipe later.

   Each chapter will be a document, and its overview is yours to write, in the family’s voice. “Sundays were for the long oven: the pot roast went in before church and came out when we got home.” These overviews are what a reader meets first, and they are where the index finds the names of people and places.

2. 2

   Photograph the box and hand it to your assistant

   Photograph every card, front and back, in good light, a chapter’s worth at a time. Give the photos to the assistant you already use, in Claude or ChatGPT, with know.sh connected, and ask it to make a document per chapter on your shelf and a finding per card. Forty cards become forty recipes in one sitting instead of four evenings of squinting.

   Tell it to transcribe exactly what the card says before interpreting anything. “Oleo”, “a slow oven” and “a lump of butter the size of an egg” are part of the record; the conversions come later, underneath. Where it cannot read a word, it should write [unclear] rather than guess.

3. 3

   Give every recipe the same four parts

   A cookbook is easier to read when every page has the same shape. Under each recipe’s title, write:

   • The story: who made it, when, and why it mattered. Two or three sentences is plenty.
   • Ingredients, as a list.
   • Method, as numbered steps.
   • What the card does not say: the pan size, the oven temperature, the trick everyone knew.

   Ask your assistant for that shape on every finding, then open each one with Edit beside its photo. Fix the misreadings, fill the [unclear] gaps and write the story yourself; that part is the family’s, not the assistant’s.

   Title each recipe by its dish, “Buttermilk biscuits”, not “Nana’s favourite”, and name the cook early in the story’s first line: “Made by Nana Rose every Sunday from 1961.” The index picks up names that recur in titles and first lines, so a recipe that names its cook at the top is filed under that cook.

4. 4

   Ask your assistant what the cards leave out

   Ask your assistant to read a chapter, naming it, for measurements that are not standard and steps that are missing. Ask it to put its list in a new finding rather than change the recipes: you want a checklist of questions, not a rewritten card.

   Take that list to the people who know. Relatives cannot write in your library, so this part happens on the phone, at the kitchen table or by email, and you file what you learn. Put the answer in the recipe itself, and where two people remember it differently, keep both: select the line and leave a Note — “Aunt Jo says lard, not butter; Uncle Pete says it was always butter by 1975.”

5. 5

   Standardise without erasing

   Once the family has answered, add modern measurements under the originals rather than replacing them: “a coffee cup of flour (about 1 cup, 125 g)”. Your assistant can draft these conversions for a whole chapter; check each one against a kitchen scale or a reliable conversion table, because an old coffee cup is not a measuring cup and the assistant can be wrong. Revisions show every line it changed.

   Add a last line to every recipe listing its allergens, and for meat and poultry, the safe internal temperature. The note at the end of this recipe lists both.

6. 6

   Let the index do its work

   Open the index and read it like a stranger would. The family should be there — Rose, Walt, Jo, Pete — with the places that mattered, like Woolworth’s, each followed by the numbers of their recipes. If a cook is missing, their name is not near the top of any recipe yet. Ingredients are everyday words, and the index leaves those out; for them, press ⌘K and type pecans, and Look up finds every recipe that uses them.

   Mark the recipes the family cannot do without as Key, and highlight the lines people always get wrong. Highlighted recipes show their numbers in bold in the index, beside the cook who made them.

7. 7

   Publish a chapter at a time

   When a chapter reads well, press Share and make a public link. It is read-only and shows the overview and every recipe, without your notes or highlights. Copy it the moment it appears; know.sh shows the full link only once. Add a password if you would rather it stayed in the family.

   Links are made one document at a time, so a five-chapter cookbook is five links. Make a sixth document called Read me first with a paragraph of welcome and the five links, share that one, and send it to the family group chat. If a recipe includes a living relative’s private story, leave that finding out of the link from its own page.