How it works
Three chapters, the way a book gets made.
Bring whatever the recipe lives in today. Kitchenlore reads it, sets it in order, keeps the cook's own words, and adds it to a family book you can share and print.
Bring the cards, the memos and the messages.
Most family recipes live in three places: a box of index cards, a phone full of voice memos, and a group chat where someone typed the steps from memory at eleven at night. Kitchenlore takes all three, and a recipe can come from more than one of them at once.
Card photos
Photograph the card on the counter with your phone, flat and in daylight. Both sides if there is writing on the back. Cursive, ballpoint, faded pencil, a typed card with handwritten corrections, two languages on one card: all of it is read line by line, margins included.
Voice memos
Forward the memo of her walking through the dal, or record a new one while she cooks. On Keeper and Heirloom, memos are transcribed word for word in the language she spoke, and the full transcript stays beside the recipe, so you can always read and hear exactly what she said.
Pasted text
Copy the steps out of the family chat, an old email or a note on someone’s phone and paste them in. Typos and all. Kitchenlore keeps the text as it came and builds the recipe from it.
Kitchenlore structures it, and keeps their words.
Each source becomes a real recipe: a title, ingredients with the amount set apart from the item, numbered steps, times and servings when the source gives them. The amounts stay exactly as written. A “teacup of rice” stays a teacup.
The steps stay in the writer’s own wording, lightly separated into sentences. We do not rewrite them in recipe-book English, and we do not translate a card unless you ask.
Then the part that matters most. The asides, warnings and jokes (“Don’t flatten!”, “beta, not like that”) are lifted out as In her words notes and set beside the method. Every one of them is checked against the original, word for word. If a quote is not in the source, it is dropped. Nothing is reworded to sound nicer.
You can always read the full transcript and look at the original photo or memo next to the finished page. Nothing about the source is thrown away.
The book grows, gets shared, and prints.
Every recipe lands in your family book with an ink and watercolor illustration and a suggested chapter. The book is private by default. When you are ready, invite family by email to a single book as a viewer, who can read, or a contributor, who can also add recipes and fill gaps.
Contributors are how a book fills up. The cousin with Aunt Inger’s krumkake card adds it from Seattle. Your father records the memo about the summer his mother made pickles in the bathtub. The book collects them all in one place, each with its source attached.
When the book feels ready, export it. Every plan downloads a reading PDF and Markdown. Heirloom adds a print-ready edition, 6 by 9 inches with bleed, ready for any print-on-demand service.
The gaps
What happens with the spots nobody can read.
Some cards have been through fifty years of butter and steam. When Kitchenlore cannot read a word or hear a phrase with confidence, it does not guess. It writes [hard to read] in that exact spot and lists it under the recipe, so you can see what is missing and where.
That is where the family comes in. Anyone with the contribute role can open the spot and type what they remember:
Ingredients · Molasses Crinkles
1/2 tsp. cloves filled by Karen
The card said [hard to read] under a water ring. Karen remembers watching Nana measure it.
Every fill is signed with the name of the person who made it and shown in a different mark from the original, so the book always tells you two things honestly: what the card said, and what the family remembers. If nobody remembers, the mark stays. That is part of the story too.
Try it on one card first. It takes about a minute.