How to turn a photo of a cookbook page into a recipe

The recipes you cook most are usually the ones you can't search. A grandmother's card in a tin. The one dish from a cookbook you otherwise never open. A page torn from a magazine in 2011 and folded into a drawer.

They're also the ones most likely to be lost for good, because there's exactly one copy.

The short answer

Open Fork & Spoon, choose photo import, and photograph the page. Up to four photos go in at once and come back as one recipe, with the ingredients and amounts as separate rows and the steps in order. Edit anything that came through wrong, then save.

How to shoot it so it works

This matters more than anything else on this page. The photo is the input, and a bad photo produces a bad recipe.

• Flat. Press the book open, or lay the card on a table. A curved page bends the text lines and the amounts drift onto the wrong rows.
• Straight on. Shoot from directly above rather than at an angle, because a trapezoid page is much harder to read than a rectangular one.
• Even light. Daylight near a window is ideal. Overhead light plus your own shadow across the page is the worst case. Move the book rather than fighting the light.
• Fill the frame. The page should take up most of the photo. Ingredients set in small type are the first thing to suffer when the page is small in frame.
• No flash on glossy paper. A cookbook page with a gloss finish bounces the flash straight back and whites out a chunk of the text.

Fork & Spoon takes these photos at higher resolution than the app uses anywhere else, specifically because ingredient lines are small. It's worth giving it something sharp to work with.

Multiple pages

Recipes rarely fit on one page. The method continues overleaf, or the ingredient list sits in a sidebar on the facing page.

Photograph up to four pages in one go. The app keeps the picker open so you can add them one after another, with thumbnails you can remove if a shot came out badly. They all go in together and come back as a single recipe, rather than four fragments you have to stitch together yourself.

What to check before you save

Photo import is the path most worth reviewing, and the errors are predictable:

• Amounts and units. The most common miss. A ½ that reads as a 1, or a "tbsp" that becomes "tsp". These are also the errors that ruin a dish, so scan the numbers first.
• Oven temperatures, especially on older books that give gas marks, or American books in Fahrenheit.
• Fractions in handwriting. A hand-drawn ¾ is genuinely ambiguous.
• Sidebars and notes. A "cook's tip" box next to the method sometimes gets folded into the steps, which is easy to delete.

The steps themselves usually come through cleanly. It's the numbers that need your eyes.

What works and what struggles

Works well: printed cookbook pages, magazine clippings, recipe cards in clear handwriting, printouts, restaurant menus with a dish described in detail, photos of a recipe on someone else's screen.

Struggles: very faded ink, cramped handwriting in pencil, pages photographed at a steep angle, heavily decorative typefaces, and recipes where the ingredients are woven into paragraphs of prose rather than listed.

Getting it to the rest of the family

This is the path where sharing matters most, because the recipe used to exist once and now it doesn't have to.

A link anyone can open. Send the recipe to a sibling, a cousin, or a child who's moved out, and it opens as an ordinary web page in whatever browser they've got. No app, no account, no sign-up. They can read it on a phone in their own kitchen the same evening.

A shared cookbook across both kinds of phone. If several of you want to keep the collection together, a shared cookbook works between iPhone and Android at the same time. Nobody has to switch ecosystems to inherit the recipe tin.

And a browser, for the photographing session itself. app.forkandspoon.app opens the same account on a laptop with nothing installed, which is a better place to tidy up thirty recipes at once than a phone screen.

Doing it by hand

Type it out. There's no clever alternative, and that's genuinely the manual version, which is why the tin of cards has been sitting there for fifteen years.

If you want a halfway house, most phones can already select text inside a photo: take the picture, long-press the text, copy, paste into notes. You'll get a wall of unstructured text with no amounts separated, which is better than nothing and worse than a recipe.

Why this one is worth doing

The digital recipes are safe. They exist on a server somewhere, and if you lose them you can find them again.

The recipe card can't be found again. Photographing it is the only backup it'll ever have. Once it's in a cookbook you can share it, with a sibling or a child who's moved out, and it stops being one object in one drawer in one house.