I’ve spent my life in search of the IDEAL ways to organize many things, and the one that’s bothering me now is recipes.
I want a physical format, for sure. Digital just doesn’t work in the kitchen. I want to be able to add, remove, and re-organize my recipes. I’d like to be able to flip to certain sections quickly. I don’t really want paper in plastic binder pages, because they’re heavy and slippery. I do, on the other hand, need plenty of room because some of my recipes are complicated.
My mother has a metal box sized to hold 6x9 index cards. It’s been her recipe file for 45 years. I can’t find such a box at a reasonable price and that isn’t plain ugly black.
I’m sorry I don’t have the solution you are looking for, but came to say, you are not alone. I’d love some ideas about how to store mine. I have some in a small box, some bookmarked, and some just floating around my kitchen. I’m a fairly organized person, but it seems like I can’t keep them all together. Great question, and I’m sure we’ll get some great ideas!
I started out by sorting them by main ingredient: veggie, beef, seafood, etc., putting them in folders. It quickly became obvious that it just won’t work. I think that ideally, something like Adobe Acrobat (with indexing) would likely work best. I already have two cookbooks I’ve created in MS Word, and that has a search function. I just print out whatever I’m planning to make. I have no interest in recopying all of this to a new format.
Remember the old punch cards? Holes in the top of the card, in coded configurations. You slip knitting needles into the holes to extract all the cards that are pre-punched. Lift out all the “chicken” cards, or all the “Italian” cards or all the “curry” cards. Eight holes allows to sort for 100 categories. It doesn’t matter what order you put them away in. They just need to be the same sized cards in a box that holds the edges aligned.
Years ago, I decided on a basic 2-column vertical format that I like: in the left column I show the ingredients, in order added; in the right column I tell what should be done (add, stir in, beat together, etc.)
A decade ago, I began compiling family favorites to pass along to my niece. Now each Christmas my sister and I go through the random clippings and pages for things we’ve tried during the year, and decide what deserves to get retyped into the family cookbook. I use InDesign professionally, so it’s no sweat for me to quickly add another few pages in the right format. The pages are printed out, cut in half to be 5.5 x 8.5 pages, holepunched, and added to our respective looseleaf books, which are organized into a half-dozen simple categories.
I use a 115-page-long (and growing) Word document divided into categories (starters, pasta, soups, eggs, etc.) with links to each category at the beginning of the document. As Chefguy mentioned, you can search a Word document for any recipes that you have trouble finding (because they could appear in more than one category), although the drawback for me is that I have to make a few trips from the kitchen to the computer while cooking. One solution would be a dedicated handheld device, like a tablet that you keep in the kitchen.
That’s what I’ve been doing. I find it lacks aesthetic satisfaction, which I’ve been trying to replace by hand-copying the critical information in a recipe every time I want it. Maybe that’s as good as it gets.
I transfer every recipe, sometimes by clipping and pasting but usually by retyping in a larger font in a Word document, printing to 8.5 x 11 sheets, then putting them in three ring binder plastic protector sleeves. I group types of meals into different one-inch binders - meals, desserts, crock pot, etc. I can never manage to keep the individual binder recipes in any order, but the binders aren’t that big - it isn’t hard to search through to find what I am looking for. I’ll add pictures if the original recipe included one - often printing it on the backside. One recipe per binder sheet, and then you can see both sides easily.
Above my workspace, I have a spring clip stuck to the cabinet. I take the recipe from the book, still in the sleeve, and clip it overhead at eye level. I can follow along easily without having to keep a full sized cookbook on the counter and opened to the right page. Keeps it out of the way, but right where I can read it (this is where the large font helps.) I also try to fit the entire recipe on one side - a lot of on-line recipes tend to print to two pages, so I cut and past and reformat it so it fits. (I also remove all the empty chattiness that on-line recipes love so much - “my mother loved this recipe, we made it before going to funerals”. Who cares! Get to the recipe part!)
I’ll try recipes that are still in cookbooks, but if one works well, I’ll retype it to Word and print it out. I can fix the ingredients lists, too, or resize the recipe for smaller portions, or eliminate the variations I’ll never use.
I have a recipe notebook for favorites. They are printed out on 3x5 cards, and those are placed into plastic binder sheets, which hold 6 to a page. The binder is organized by food category, such as appetizers, mains, desserts, breakfast, and so on. New things are just printed out on a big sheet, and used that way. I stuff them in the front of the binder. If they are used a few times and make to a favorite, then I transfer them into my recipe software, which prints them out in the recipe format (I already have it, but one could easily set up Word or similar to do this as well).
I know you said no plastic binders, but I use those clear plastic binders with clear plastic pages bound into them. They are really easy to flick through and are wipe clean, so I can insert any found recipes into them - magazine cut-outs, hand scribbles, typed pages. Very handy.
I would also like more information. How does the knitting needle not get blocked by anything that doesn’t have the chicken hole punched, as an example?
