Show Your Recipe Scrapbooks!

[ValyceNegative]

Quick story time first! My grandmother wasn't a great cook nor knew many recipes, so in an effort to improve her technique when she married, she created her own "recipe book of the house" by grafting together magazine clips, writing down recipes told by her friends and family, and collecting everything in one big notebook. My mother kept adding recipes once grown up, and as a kid I'd see this big collaged book handled by my mom, grandma and aunts whenever they wanted to try out something special for occasions.

I was enamoured by this concept and I was convinced every house had their own recipe notebook filled with years of paperclips, writings from all members of the family, drawings, photos, and who knows what other fun stationery things! Maybe I wasn't even too far from the truth, recipe books are common inspirations for scrapbooking projects.

Fast forward to a few years ago when I moved in with my husband, mother in law left me around 30 cooking magazines she had laying around... flipping through them to find a single recipe was a mess, so I started cutting out the stuff that interested me. I was initially very excited to work on my very own recipe book but I couldn't find my "planner peace" with what I was doing at the time so it was left abandoned for a while.

Welp, just the other week I found the perrrrfect binder and inserts so I restarted from scratch and after 10-12 days of work, I can call it "complete"! Well, complete as of now, I do plan to add as I find new stuff of course! So I just wanted to show it around, share some of my favourite spreads and dividers, and ask if any of you guys have a recipe book of your own! Let's show off!

More piccies!

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Here's the binder! I chose a plastic cover with an internal pocket to store smaller magazine clippings and I added a big pocket insert to store full pages waiting to be transcribed, some sort of an "inbox" section like in organizer planners.

Divider pics!

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I divided recipes in six categories and I color coded them! All the titles have the same color of their section.

Even more pics, omg

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Here's some of the cooler spreads! In my first version, I had just one recipe per page, and I was writing too big for my tastes, so everything was a tad ugly for me. This time I went with a smaller handwriting to fit two reciped per page. The more condensed layout was a better choice in the end and I really like how all this looks! To be honest, considering the magazines were from the 80s and 90s, a good part of the recipes are too stuffy and they aren't fit for everyday dishes, but it's just fun to have them here as a collection. XD

Last pics I promise

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At the end of the sections I have another special insert with full pages that I didn't want to cut and paste because they are too full of useful pics: these are step by step tutorials on various kitchen techniques (how to properly cut different meats, how to make and preserve sauces and jams, so on). I taped the pages together so they look like tiny books to flip through.

Anddd, that's all! Hope to see some of your creations soon! :3

[fairyrune]

we have a book similar in our house. it's a spiralbound notebook created with the purpose of being a recipe book. we also have a similar spiralbound notebook of newspaper scraps and print-outs of recipe websites pasted onto coloured card. somewhere in the depths of our cupboards, we also have a threadbound notebook with handwritten family recipes in. i wish i could find it!

the only problem with these is that you can't move the pages around... the way you've organized the recipes is very nice, i would be annoyed if i opened my recipe book and there were desserts and snacks scattered throughout the soup section.

i've actually been gathering recipes from various websites and putting them on obsidian. i have pretty extreme sensitivities to food texture and there's only a few things i will eat right now, so i've been putting in some effort lately to try and broaden my horizons. as i live with other people who usually cook it's a bit difficult to try new things they wouldn't normally make, too.

so far i've been organizing by meal type - so "dinners" for bigger meals, easy and quick things for breakfast/lunch, snacks, desserts, etc. but obviously a hard copy of this is never a bad idea! so i might take inspiration from your scrapbook and use a binder so i can rearrange things. i also think pictures are super valuable; most of our notes don't have them but i am a visual person. i also have a ton of stickers that i'm probably not going to use for a journal, so it might make cooking more fun if i put them in with some recipes!

[ValyceNegative]

That's a great start! Indeed I have noticed a lot of indie websites saving links and sites for recipes they like but (linking ourselves to the other thread that talks about living without the Internet) what happens if that site goes down or that specific webpage is wiped? Local and physical copies can be a lifesave.

Added pictures to the recipes help a lot. Although the spreads I have photographed all have example pics I have many other recipes that were reported on the magazine as text-only and I had nothing to paste beside it. Doesn't matter much from the aesthetic point of view but they're incredibly helpful in understanding if something is up with your skills, how an ingredient gets used and what tools you'll need. The text-only have a veil of mystery and you're left thinking "is this how it was really supposed to look like?" once the dish is done. XD

Oh, but the text ain't useless. Copying it properly is a skill of its own and many times I had to readjust what the magazine was saying because they'd somehow leave ingredients behind. >.>
But at least they are more descriptive than what my grandma used to write on her book- we still have some cakes whose written process is just "mix, oven, done" which, I mean, she wasn't wrong, but has left us scratching our heads in confusion nonetheless xD

[Horsey Chobunso]

A few months ago my wife and I went to a creative reuse event held by the local food co-op. This specific event was using a giant stack of magazines, boxes, photos, etc to bind a recipe book. The actual pages are just regular blank printer paper that was salvaged from office demolitions. The binding is a really basic string binding done with a needle and a lot of knots.

Photography is one of my main hobbies, so I mostly used photos from the pile, including a slide that I mounted into the cover. I've been trying to organize it so it works as a recipe book as well as a general cooking methods book for myself. Most of my favorite recipes are from YouTubers, so there isn't always a good written account of them anywhere. I think it will be interesting to see how it progresses over time.