How to digitize a cookbook recipe

The recipes that matter most are usually the ones that exist in exactly one place: your grandmother's card box, a cookbook that's out of print, a page your aunt photocopied in 1994. Digitizing them used to mean typing. Now it means photographing the page — if you do it right.

RecipeTables reads a photo of a recipe— printed or handwritten, any layout, any language — and returns the whole thing as a structured table you can scale, translate, and cook from. Here's how to get a clean read on the first try, learned from the photos that fail.

This is the one that matters. Hold the camera parallel to the page, directly above it, so the text runs level. A photo taken at an angle — the book lying open on the table, you shooting from your chair — warps every line, and warped quantities are exactly where reading goes wrong. We'd rather reject an angled photo than guess whether that's ½ or 1/2-smudged-by-perspective; a wrong quantity in a clean-looking table is worse than no table.

Flatten the spine with a thumb if the book fights you, or press the page under glass. Daylight beats lamplight; shadow across the text costs more than low light overall.

A recipe that runs across a spread, or continues overleaf, can be sent as up to three photos in one conversion — they're read together as one recipe. What can't be recovered is what isn't in frame: the most common failure after angle is a cropped final step or an ingredient list that continues under your thumb. Check the corners before you convert.

Handwritten cards work more often than people expect — legible cursive included. Layout doesn't need to be recipe-shaped either: two-column magazine pages, margin notes, a card where the method wraps around the ingredient list. The reading isn't template matching; it's done by a model that understands what a recipe is.

Language is a non-issue: the table comes back in the language the recipe is written in, faithful to the source. If you'd rather cook it in English — or Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese — the translation view is one menu away, and the original stays the original.

Not a text file — that's where OCR apps stop, and a text file of grandma's recipe still needs retyping into anything useful. You get a structured table: quantities you can scale properly, cups and grams switchable, a shopping list, and a link you can send to the rest of the family — which, for the card-box recipes, is usually the entire point.

Photos are private by default: converting one never publishes it anywhere, and the photo itself isn't kept after the table is built. The table is yours to share or not.