Creating your Own Recipes Family Cookbook
I included stories and actual recipes written by the person when I was actually able to get a copy of the recipe written by them. Some of the really old ones needed to be digitally cleaned up. This was a long and tedious process but so worth it at the end.
Cleaning up old recipes:
Work with a copy of the scanned original. I used Paint Shop Pro and blew them up at 20 to 1. Then pixel by pixel recreate the writing and clean up the background.
Sample of the original recipe – the pages were also heavily stained with age. (which was not a bad thing, I just had to choose what I was trying to convey here and in this case it was my great grandmother’s handwriting.
Cleaned up recipe
Story sample:
The advantages of all but using a publishing company are that you can include handwritten recipes, memories or mementoes and your family history. For instance here is a memory my mother wrote about life at Grandma’s in the 1940’s. “Grandma Beatty had us set up the croquet set in the side yard and whipped us easily every game. Whenever Aunt Grace, Grandma’s sister came to visit, she would sit at the dining room window and watch us play. She usually made her special recipe of Divinity. It was great when the Hillmans, Marvin (Baldy) and Thelma with daughters Dianne and Judy came to visit. Baldy always went downtown and bought vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. It helped to make up for the big dog they would sometimes bring.” It gives a glimpse into the past for future generations to read.
Leave a Reply