Creating your Own Recipes Family Cookbook

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.

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

This was written by my great grandmother. This is actually one of the better old recipes I worked with. What you don't see is when this gets blown up that there are little black dots all over the background. These will show up when your book is printed.