Calm Cooking Chaos (Part 1): Organize Your Paper Recipes
The flip of the calendar page to November doesn’t just bring darker evenings and colder weather. The minute the Halloween candy left the store shelves, it was replaced with holiday ingredients. Minutes ago it was barely autumn and now we’re mere weeks from Thanksgiving, and you know what’s right around the corner after Turkey Day!
There’s never so much of a resurgence in interest in recipes — and recipe organizing — as during the approach of the holiday season. Clients start calling with a twinge of trepidation in their voices.
They’ve got decades of acquired cookbooks, recipe boxes filled with handwritten index cards, and mountains of recipes culled from magazines or printed from the internet. The desire to create a perfect family holiday is weighed down by the stress of recipe clutter.
And with some families, there’s a desire to create a culinary legacy, a way to pass down the favorite meals prepared for special times. For example this recent Washington Post piece, A Holocaust Survivor, A Rescued Family Cookbook, and the Taste of Home, reminds us of how important it is to be able to bring alive the favorite tastes of childhood.
THE COOK CONTINUUM
You might think this is only a problem for people who suffer with general household clutter, but I assure you recipe clutter is a problem all along the culinary continuum, from people who rely on PB&J skills (that would be Paper Doll) to lifelong cooks to professional chefs, and the existence of recipe clutter may or may not correlate with any other clutter in the home.
We answer the age old question: Is it safe to you use your oven as a closet like Carrie Bradshaw did or nah? https://t.co/BxYQ2vATB2 pic.twitter.com/0sU8QDWqMt
— Reviewed (@reviewed) July 21, 2018
Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw famously kept her sweaters in the oven. Similarly, to Paper Mommy‘s distress, I’m really not inclined to cook, and if it requires more than boiling pasta and drizzling it with olive oil, I’m not going to do it. There’s only one “special” recipe I make when called upon to bring something to a potluck, Hello Dollies (also known as Magic Cookie Bars), the recipe for which has lived under a succession of magnets on my fridge for several decades.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have cookbooks or even individual recipes. I do, but they’re organized and out of the way.
But even for non-cooks, cookbooks and loose recipes represent potential. Those glossy photos enchant us. We can imagine ourselves as Julia or Nigella or Ina, whipping up something fabulous.
For the same reason we read fashion magazines and follow tips on “how to turn a daytime look into an evening look” when our evening “look” is actually leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, we non-cooks collect recipes because they represent an imagined lifestyle.
Whether we’re the ones whipping up healthy and visually stunning recipes to delight our families and friends, or we imagine our butler Jeeves taking our recipe collection in hand, recipes seem like a more reasonable fantasy than jetting off to Paris or Madrid.
For those who actually do cook, whether a little or a lot, recipe clutter tends to expand over time. If you’re a good cook, people give you cookbooks as gifts. If you’re a good eater, people press their lovingly handwritten recipes into your palms at the end of dinner parties, believing their secret sauce will help you achieve your greatest dreams.
So no wonder, between our own inclinations to gather potentially delicious and delightful recipes and others’ penchants for sharing the magic with us, we all end up with more recipes than we will ever make, and that leads to clutter.
HOW TO PARE DOWN A COOKBOOK COLLECTION
Is your family food headquarters littered with clipped and copied recipes, cooking magazines, regular and diet-related cookbooks, and other detritus from the pandemic sourdough wars? It’s not just you. Kitchen clutter is often a sticky mess, preventing us from ever finding the perfect recipe when we want or need it.
The toys and clothes that surround us may no longer be age-, size-, or lifestyle-appropriate. Similarly, we can outgrow cookbooks, diets, and recipes that once fit us so well. You have probably accepted that it’s time to (amicably) part with Macrobiotics for a Groovy Life or 172 Ways To Lose Weight With Grapefruit.
Find all the tendrils of your sprawling cookbook collection.
Most people tend to treat their cookbooks as a separate entity from the rest of their personal libraries. They are content to keep their fiction and reference books on bookcases and shelves in their living rooms, family rooms, and bedrooms, in their reading nooks and wherever they cozy up to read.
But herein lies the first problem. If your cookbooks are far from where you cook, you’ll probably never use them. It’s not like there are miles between your living room and kitchen counter, but if your cookbooks are on the bookshelves two rooms over, unless you’re diligent about creating new menus, you’ll probably forget that you even have the cookbooks.
Conversely, if you follow the general organizing practice of keeping possessions where you use them and your cookbooks are in or near your kitchen, you’ve probably got sticky, sauce-stained, powdered sugar-covered pages piled on spare chairs and kitchen counters and inside cabinets. No matter how excited people are to cook, and then eat, their creations, most people aren’t that excited about tidying up.
Cookbook Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash
Even if we organizers persuade clients that dinner isn’t done until the dishes are washed and the leftovers are put away, that final step of wiping down spattered cookbooks and putting them back into the collection tends to be a bridge too far.
So, meet your cookbooks where they are. If there are too many to deal with all at once, start with the ones that constitute clutter, that live where they’ve been dropped, in and near the kitchen, and once you’ve reviewed them, then move on to making determinations about the ones that are tidily living (if forgotten) on your bookshelves.
Take one book at a time and ask yourself some important questions.
Have you ever used a recipe from this cookbook?
If you received a cookbook as a holiday present or for your birthday, you likely flipped through the book, perhaps looked at the Table of Contents, and then tucked the book away to clean up after all the wrapping paper was tidied away. Maybe you never looked at it at all.
Sometimes, we buy cookbooks because the cover or the author made the book tempting. A few years ago, Spoon University published a piece on The Hottest Male Chefs of All Time. I’m sure it sold cookbooks. But just because you love watching Jamie Oliver cook, melt over Gordon Ramsay yelling at his kitchen staff, or giggle over the performance stylings of Alton Brown, it doesn’t mean you’re ever going to prepare recipes from their collections. Let go of unread cookbooks!
Just because you love watching Jamie Oliver cook, melt over Gordon Ramsay yelling at his kitchen staff, or giggle over the performance stylings of Alton Brown does not mean you're ever going to prepare recipes from their collections.… Click To TweetAs you go through your cookbooks, if you come across one you’ve never made even one recipe from, flip through the Table of Contents to get a sense of the chapters or categories. If you don’t see at least a handful of recipes you’d like to try — like in the next two weeks — it may be a sign that it’s time to set that cookbook free.
If a cookbook is a time-tested classic, like Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Julie Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or even a modern classic like Samsin Nosrat‘s Salt Fat Acid Heat and you consider yourself a shaky cook, you might find comfort in these standard-bearers.
But if you’ve got a big tome of recipes that you’ve never used, and you aren’t inspired by them? Buh-bye!
Have you used a recipe from this cookbook in the last few years?
I used to ask if you’d used recipes in the past year, but nothing about the past few years has been normal.
In quarantine, people cooked more, but they entertained less, and using only one year for a gauge isn’t helpful, just as the old rubric of determining wardrobe purging by whether we’ve worn it in the last year isn’t wise. (Has anyone worn a cocktail dress in the era of COVID?)
But if you pick up a cookbook and have fond (or not-so-fond) memories of what you used to make, but haven’t touched since your kids went off to college or you and your spouse opted for heart-healthy meals, that cookbook has overstayed its welcome.
How many recipes from this cookbook do you ever actually use?
If you use the cookbook heavily, even in just one season, it makes sense to keep it and give it a place of pride in your eventual (but reduced) cookbook library.
However, if you seek the cookbook frequently but only for the same two or three recipes, copy out what you use and set the cookbook free. Next time, we’ll look at options for maintaining your recipes digitally, but for how, you have a few options:
- Hand-copy the recipe to your paper system.
- Photocopy the pages from the cookbook if you’ve got a home copier/scanner.
- Scan the recipe (with your scanner, a scanning app on your phone, or even just the scan function in your phone’s camera), then store the recipe in a digital file.
However, if you can’t remember the last time you opened it, the book has become a stranger in your home — send it away!
Give the cookbook away. If you don’t cook, but someone you love does, gift it with the chiding stipulation that you’d love it if they’d invite you over when they make the soup on page 135 or the pastry on page 310.
Donate the cookbook to your local library book sale or a book-related charity. See Ask Paper Doll: How And Where Can I Donate Lots of Books? for guidance. See if your local middle or high school has a Home Economics department (though they are vanishingly rare) that wants cookbooks or leave them in a Free Little Library.
Sell it at a local used book store or online. If your cookbooks are vintage, make up an inventory and inquire about selling them at Blackbird Cookbooks or even open your own Etsy shop. For a behind-the-scenes look at vintage cookbook sales, Taste recently published Vintage Cookbook Collecting Is Often Kind, Sometimes Cutthroat, and Now Extremely Online
Store it elsewhere than your kitchen. If you can’t bring yourself to let go of some cookbooks, whether because they’re gorgeous and or because they represents family history, and you have the bookshelf space elsewhere in your home, store extraneous ones as you would history or reference texts.
Prevent cookbook clutter in the future.
Test-drive a cookbook to see if it’s a good fit by borrowing it from friends or the library before making a purchase. Set aside a newly gifted cookbook where you can easily review it. If there’s nothing that inspires you to cook it (as opposed to inspiring fantasies of an Instagram photo showing you have cooked it), return the gift.
(Once you write the thank you note, a gift is yours. Do with it as you would if you bought something for yourself and later realized you didn’t want it!)
If you feel like you must store your active cookbooks in the kitchen, create dedicated storage where you can maintain your cookbooks upright. That might be in an unused cabinet or shelf, or you might want to invest in creating a cookbook box or drawer, building shelves, or creating a display area. For some ideas, peruse:
Food 52’s Clever Ways to Store Your Many, Many Cookbooks
The Spruce’s 15 Stylish Cookbook Display and Storage Ideas
HOW TO PARE DOWN A LOOSE RECIPE COLLECTION
Cookbooks are hard to part with because they’re fancy. Someone went to the effort of writing and collecting the recipes, taking photos, and the editing and publishing it. It’s easy to see how all that expended effort makes it hard to discard a book from your collection.
But what about the piles of loose recipes clipped out of magazines or copied after tasting a friend’s culinary triumph? They still represent potential, just as cookbooks do, but they’re usually a little easier to discard.
Unless you’re a beginner, you’re not going to tackle all of your recipes in one sitting. Instead, try to gather your recipes of similar types. Aim to deal with loose recipe pages first; later on you can tackle index cards that are banded or boxed together, or recipes already gathered in notebooks using the same process.
Select one recipe at a time and follow these simple rules:
Sift for gold.
When you pick up a recipe page, especially one clipped from a magazine, your first task may be to figure out what you were saving. If there were multiple recipes in an article on a particular theme, you may have been endeavoring to downsize your magazine collection and just clipped all the recipe pages to make a fast getaway.
When you find a recipe, identify whether it’s actually a masterpiece or a reproduction. Do you need yet another recipe for chocolate chip cookies or smoothies or meatloaf?
Is there anything special about this recipe? Did you clip it because you were hungry when you were reading the magazine? Or because the magazine’s production team made the glossy photo look gorgeous? (Do your creations ever look like the food in magazines?) Did you clip the recipe because it was created by a popular chef on TV?
If a recipe truly still appeals to you, keep it; otherwise, set it free.
Separate dreams from reality.
Friend, I ask you, will you ever really cook this?
We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that if the fanciest thing we cook is spaghetti, we’re not really going to be dabbling in egg drop soup or meringue flambé from scratch.
If your lifestyle is such that you, your spouse, and your kids aren’t home until 15 minutes before stomachs start rumbling, recipes that require all-day attention just won’t fit your lifestyle.
If the recipes (or, more likely, the photos with those recipes) are truly dazzling but out of your reach, create a “Dream Recipes” folder to keep in your files along with dream vacations and dream decorating ideas. You can preserve the dream without cluttering your kitchen.
If the photos with those recipes are truly dazzling but out of your reach, create a Dream Recipes folder to keep in your files along with dream vacations & decorating ideas. You can preserve the dream without cluttering your… Click To TweetDivide and conquer.
Once you’ve managed to reduce your recipe pile from a mountain to a bundt cake-sized mole hill, sort your recipes into categories. Ask, under what meaningful category does this recipe fall?
By meaningful, I mean meaningful to you and your family. Pretend you’re a cookbook editor and come up with some major categories, and then add the ones that fit your family’s dining style. For example:
- Appetizers — if you’re the type to design charcuterie (warning: you will salivate when exploring that page) or have jumped into the viral trend of butter boards, and your pre-dinner delights are more hors d’oeuvres than string cheese and potato chips, gather your inspiration here.
- Salads
- Entrées
- Side Dishes
- Desserts
- Holiday recipes and menus — think: family traditions by holiday and celebrations, with each family member’s favorites
- Birthdays
- Hanukkah
- Christmas
- Passover
- Easter
- Independence Day picnics
- Sporting event tailgates
- Ethnic dishes, subdivided by world region, if you don’t blend them into your other categories
- Specialty recipes for family members with dining limitations — vegetarian, vegan, allergy-free, gluten-free, etc.
Once you have a healthy stack for each category (and are certain you’re really going to attempt to cook each item), you’re ready for the final step.
“Publish” your own cookbook.
Buy a fat (2″ or 3″) three-ring (D-ring) binder notebook or several 1″ binders, depending on your preference, and a box of transparent, plastic sheet protectors.
Slide each recipe into a sheet protector. If a recipe is continued on the back of a page, you’ll be able to see the front and reverse easily; if the recipe is continued on another page, place it back to back with the prior page. For recipes that are only on one page, you can arrange two recipes back-to-back.
If you’re happy with recipes on index cards and have a preferred metal or wooden index box, stick with it, but to blend your recipe cards with the binder system, you can purchase recipe card sheet protectors in 3″ x 5″ or larger sizes.
Why else do you want a sheet protector? You will not want to punch holes in each of your recipe sheets before putting them in your binder, and you won’t want to deal with ripped edges/holes of often-used recipe sheets.
The sheet protectors keep the recipes from getting damaged or sticky and can be easily cleaned with a sponge.
If you’re keeping multiple categories in one binder, label simple subject dividers to separate the categories. I find clients prefer hard plastic dividers and use my label maker to create clear and uniform labels.
Alternatively, you can use adhesive index tabs. Post-it has some nice versions in primary colors and richer assorted colors.
3-ring binders come with clear front panels. Slide a yummy photo into the front panel to make it look snazzy. Similarly, most 
For an upgrade that’s still DIY, the Cookbook People specializes in personalizable binders and labels. Taste of Home Magazine recently published 15 of the Prettiest Recipe Books You Can Buy, and The Spruce Eats reviewed The 8 Best Recipe Organizers in 2022. The Kate Spade recipe binder in multiple styles seems to be a favorite, but I find the version listed in both articles to be garish and extra-pricey. Not that my preference matters, but I prefer this lemony version.
Check the measurements of any recipe binder you purchase; the binder needs to meet or exceed the length and width of any recipe page you have. Most magazines are just about 8 1/2″ x 11″, the same size as the copy paper onto which you might print a recipe from the web; larger magazines like Real Simple are 9″ x 11″. However, some pre-made recipe binder kits can be shorter and/or narrower, leaving recipes sticking out.
Preserve the family recipes you love — and actually use — in a way that’s handy, organized, and easy to keep intact. If paper is your preferred method, these tips with keep you afloat through the holidays and for all cooking seasons.
However, if digital is more your style, next week’s post will offer more modern, sharable options for organizing and accessing your favorite recipes.
How do you keep your family recipes?
Paper Doll Post:
You are speaking my language. =) Some years ago, I decided to get rid of my paper binders and go digital with those recipes. I scanned them using the Tinyscanner app and saved them in a folder by the recipe’s name. It works great, and I still pull from these recipes every so often.
Card boxes, binders or digital, all that matters is that it’s the right solution for you! I don’t know if you’ll improve upon your Tinyscanner method, but next week will focus on digital solutions like the one you’ve chosen!
Julie, such a timely blog. I just worked through my recipes and recipe books.
First of all, when I see a new recipe I like I will cut it out and place it on top of my recipe folders. The rule is that I have to try it out before I will file it away.
My recipes are in file folders by categories.
In the last few years, a lot of recipes I had enjoyed preparing are no longer enjoyed by my husband, so I have stopped fixing them. I purged all of those. I also purged ones that are just too difficult for the outcome.
I got rid of almost 2/3 of the stack.
I had two new cookbooks that I had not used. I took the time to look through them at each recipe. One book I realized I would never use – I donated it. The other cookbook I put sticky notes on about 20 pages and plan on trying at least two recipes a month.
Three of my cookbooks are literally falling apart. I put rubber bands around them to hold them together.
I’m good to go now – and my meal planning will be easier.
Thanks for sharing, Jonda. While I generally love file folders, it’s been my experience that many clients who put their recipes in folders, they’re less likely to ever look in those folders again. Somehow, binders are more inviting for review. I’m glad they work for you, though!
Hurray for you for paring your recipe collection. Enjoy those new recipes!
It’s so interesting how generationally we store our recipes (and cookbooks.) I’m not a huge recipe user. There are some things I make requiring a recipe, but most of the meals I make I can pull together without looking at instructions. Mostly, I use recipes for baking or special side dishes I rarely make. I have a “flexible” system comprised of yes…index cards in a wooden file box, loose sheets in my filing cabinet, and two go-to cookbooks (one more tattered and stained that the other.) For me, all of this works.
The cookbooks we rarely use are in the kitchen, but in an out of the way place. We’re talking step ladder territory for the vertically challenged population (me!)
But for clients who love to cook and have a lot of loose recipes, I love the notebook-type system like the one you suggested. It’s flexible.
One of my daughters cooks using her laptop with the digital recipe on the screen. My other daughter likes the index card method (like the one I use.)
No question that organizing recipes is one of those deeply satisfying projects. And for those that like to cook or who aspire to cook, it can feel good to get things into a useful system. It may even spark actual cooking for those who would like to do more of it.
Hee! As pictured in this blog, my recipes and cookbooks (which, to be fair, I rarely use) are in the cabinets above the bonnet/fan over the stove. It would otherwise be dead space, but my vertically challenged self can just about stand on tiptoe if necessary.
Your daughter’s approach is getting more and more popular. Me? I’d be afraid of spilling or splattering the keyboard. It takes all kinds! Thanks for sharing your approach!
I’ve helped clients organize recipes, and I m-i-g-h-t cook more than you do, but what I do enjoy is watching cooking videos. The shorter the better. My favorites at the moment are by @TurkuazKitchen. 1 min. tops. Just the highlights, no belabored processes. Gorgeous old-world style images and sounds. Music but no talking. No faces, even, just the food being prepared. Recipe in the comments. I’m never making the recipes anyway, so the details don’t really matter to me.
Organizing cooking videos is even easier; you just create a playlist in YouTube and save your favorite recipes to the playlist. Maybe I should mention that in the next post? I couldn’t find TurkuazKitchen on YouTube or Twitter. Is it Instagram? (I don’t do Insta.) I would be hopeless without narration telling me what was going on. Poach? Fold? I need to hear it and see it simultaneously to make sense of it. (Better yet, I’ll order in!)
Recipe clutter is definitely real!
I have decided that if I only make one recipe from a cookbook, I’ll just rip it out or photograph it and get rid of the bulky book.
My Mom has been hunting a replacement “accordion file” for her recipes, but I haven’t been able to find one. It is decorated like a kitchen (vs. an office), and has pockets for each type of recipe. The whole thing ties up with a ribbon across the top.
If you know of one, let me know!
In the meantime, these are great options. Mine are in a recipe binder with pockets and pages. They do “yuck out,” so every now and then getting a new one is a good idea. I’ve considered going all digital, but I just like holding the card with my relatives’ handwriting. I can’t part with those:)
Ripping out a page from a book? I’m going to faint!
I think I know exactly the kind of kitchen accordion file for recipes you describe, but if you have a photo, maybe we can crowd-source a solutioin for your mom? Thanks for reading!
I judge the worthiness of my cookbooks by how much has been splattered on the pages during my messier kitchen moments. Even better if some pages stick together ?. I also took a little time to organize a subset of recipe collections – those that come in little pamphlets with small kitchen appliances (think Vitamix, toaster oven, air fryer ). There are some good recipes in those little books! Anyway I got an accordion file with an elastic closure and bundled them all up in it, then put it on the cookbook shelf vertically with all the others.
As a result of your post, I am now inspired to go through the shelves pre-Thanksgiving and see what needs to find another home. Great info, and always so thorough!
LOL, I bet those sticky pages taste good! And I agree; my little Dash egg cooker has some great little recipes; I think you’ve found a super solution for that sub-category.
Maybe we need a cookbook exchange among the organizers on our weekly Zoom calls?
I pared down my recipe books a while ago. Before I did I made a stack to use in a talk to show how my recipe books were a timeline for my life. It started with the learn to cook, microwave cooking, cooking with kids, low fat cooking ( my husband had a heart attack), crock pot cooking ( busy with family), celebrity cookbooks, and fundraising cookbooks. It was fun to show my audience. I didn’t need to keep them because most of those stages of my life are over. Now I do google cooking. I google a recipe based on ingredients. I have some heritage recipes that we read and laughed about one Christmas and a few favourites in a folder filed into 6 categories that are used often.
What a wonderful way of looking at your cookbooks, as a timeline of your life! I hope you have written (or will write) a cookbook about this. And it’s so true that our needs for recipes change, with complexity ebbing and flowing through the years. Holding onto legacy (heritage) recipes and favorites, organized in folders, makes a lot of sense.
And I love the idea of “Google cooking,” though there have been eras of my life when typing “eggs, mustard, camera film” might not have yielded great recipes from Google. 😉
I used to save recipes from magazines. My collection was very organized but I never used them. I have been saving recipes from Pinterest for a long time and that’s where I went to find a recipe. Finally one day I took a deep breath that tossed all of my magazine recipes. I’ve never looked back!
You’re absolutely right. With the exception of specialty recipes (or special occasion recipes), I ask, “Would you make that tonight? Do you have the ingredients on hand to make it? Will you make it in the next week?” The answer is almost always “no” and people rarely go looking at their piles of recipes. I’m glad you’ve found PInterest useful for recipes!