A family recipe archive
Keep her recipes.
And keep her handwriting.
Photograph the recipe cards in the back of her drawer. We read the handwriting and give you a tidy, cookable version — while keeping her exact words and the picture of the card itself, for good.
Free for your household · no card needed · your recipes stay private
Drag to read it
Her card, and what you get back
Pull the handle across. Nothing is thrown away — you keep both.
Cookable
Nan's Beef Stew
- 900g stewing beef, cut into chunks
- 2 large onions, sliced thick
- 3 carrots
- A good spoon of plain flour
- 1 pint beef stock
Brown the beef thoroughly before it goes in — three hours in a low oven.
An example of how a recipe is kept. The photograph of the real card is kept too.
How it works
Three steps. It takes about a minute per card.
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Step one
Photograph the card
Lay it on the kitchen table and take a picture with your phone. Faded ink, splashes of gravy, a torn corner — all fine. It doesn't need to be tidy.
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Step two
We read her handwriting
The writing becomes a clear list of ingredients and steps you can actually cook from. Her exact wording is kept as she wrote it, and the photograph of the card is kept forever.
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Step three
Cook from it, share it with the family
Big, readable text for the kitchen counter. Everyone in your household has the same cookbook, on their own phone.
In her voice
Some things a card can't hold
The way she says don't rush it. Press record while she talks you through the recipe, and the recording stays with it — alongside her handwriting, for good.
- “How do you know when it’s ready?”
- “Who taught you this one?”
- “When did we used to have it?”
- Ask her while you can.
Why there's nothing to play here
Recordings are private to the household that made them — even on recipes a family has chosen to share. So we have nothing of anyone's to play you.
That's rather the point.
Recordings are never published, never used for anything, and yours to download whenever you like. An old voicemail can be uploaded too — sometimes that's the recording that matters most.
What we keep safe
A recipe is more than a list of ingredients. The parts that go missing first are the parts nobody thought to write down.
Her exact wording
"A knob of butter." "Until it looks right." We keep it unedited, next to the tidy version, because that's how she said it.
The scan of her handwriting
The card itself, kept as a photograph. The loops of her letters, the biro she used, the thumbprint in the corner.
The story behind the dish
Why it was always made at Christmas. The year the oven broke. Write it down while somebody still remembers it.
Who taught her
Every recipe came from someone. We keep the name attached, so the line back through the family stays visible.
Why bother
Recipes go missing quietly
In a house clearance. In a move into care. In a drawer nobody thought to open. It's never a decision — it just happens, and then the pudding nobody else could make is gone.
One photograph is enough to stop it.
Privacy
Private to your household, unless you say otherwise
This is a family archive first. Nothing you add is visible to anyone outside your household unless you deliberately choose to share it.
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Every recipe is private by default
When you add a recipe, only the people in your household can see it. There is no feed, no profile, nothing public. That is simply where a recipe lives.
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You publish one recipe at a time
Sharing is per recipe, never all at once. If you publish Nan's stew, you have published Nan's stew — and nothing else in the cookbook moves.
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Her handwriting is held back behind a separate tick
Her exact words and the photograph of her card are treated as family artefacts, not content. They stay private even on a published recipe unless you tick that second box yourself.
Her writing is yours. It only leaves the house if you send it.
The shared library
Some families choose to put a recipe out where others can find it. That's the shared library: a slow collection of dishes families have decided to pass on.
Browse it
Recipes other households have published. A steamed pudding from a nan in Halifax. Someone's grandad's piccalilli.
Save it into your cookbook
Take a copy into your own household's collection and cook it. It sits alongside your own, with the family it came from still credited.
It isn't a feed and there's nothing to scroll for hours. Think of it as a gift left on the side for the next family — given deliberately, one recipe at a time.
What it costs
Keeping your own recipes is free, and stays free.
Family
£0
Your household, your recipes, private forever.
- Unlimited recipes, kept private
- You and one other person
- Photos of the original handwriting
- Share your own recipes to the library
Family Plus
£3.50 per month
Or £25 a year
- Everything in Family
- Unlimited people in your household
- The full shared library — every recipe families have chosen to share
- Save any shared recipe into your own cookbook
One honest thing about the handwriting
Typing recipes in is free, forever. Having us read a photographed card into tidy text costs us real money each time, so it works on credits — every household starts with 5 free reads, and the photograph of her card is yours to keep whether you use them or not.
Need more? — one-off, no subscription, they never expire.
Do the first card this week
Not the whole box. One card — the one you'd miss most. The rest can wait for a wet Sunday.
Start your family cookbook — freeFree for your household · your recipes stay private
Made by one person, for their family, after finding a shoebox of recipe cards and realising nobody else could read the writing. You're welcome to use it.