RIP recipe cards?

15 Comments

• ElizabethInez  on  March 1, 2026

  I have my grandmother’s recipe box. She was a great baker. My father-in-law has three recipe boxes, his mother’s, his aunt’s, and his wife’s (and possibly a fourth, his mother-in-law’s). We have spent many hours with those boxes, reliving old memories, and I cooked a couple of important holiday dishes from them. I don’t see any point in creating new cards, but the old ones are treasures.

• cookbookaddict2020  on  March 1, 2026

  I wish my grandmother had written down all her recipes. I wrote down a handful in a little notebook when she was still alive and I treasure it. I don’t understand how people use phones for recipes while cooking. Too small, goes dark, what a pain.

• JimCampbell  on  March 1, 2026

  We have three recipe card boxes overflowing with recipe cards. We have my wife’s, her mothers, and her brothers. A fair number of the recipes are duplicated across the three recipe card boxes, as one would expect.

  I keep saying I am going to go through and catalog them in a spreadsheet, as I have done with links for the recipes stored on the hard drive and with links to the online recipes, but I have not gotten around to it.

• Indio32  on  March 1, 2026

  Oddly at the beginning of the year I went back to a pen & paper and I’ve found it much easier than notes on a phone especially things like shopping lists.

• gamulholland  on  March 1, 2026

  I don’t text recipes to people, but I do send them as Word/Pages or PDFdocuments so they can save them on their computer or tablet or phone, or print them out. As for recipe cards— my husband still writes cards for new favorites and puts them in the box with the old ones, including recipes from cookbooks. He has a bunch from his mother, grandma, aunts, great-aunts, and a few from various friends. We’re not that old (early 50’s) and we both are pretty tech-savvy, but I guess he just likes the paper copy— and both of us like having cookbooks in print, not just ebooks, so I guess we are analog in that sense. 🙂

• Dollhouse_Cuisine  on  March 1, 2026

  I will never stop using the ones I have. Many are treasured reminders of my mother, grandmothers, and aunts who are no longer with us. I don’t write them much myself, as my fingers are arthritic (but I have an absolute hoard of cookbooks and handwritten recipes, and never need to bring my hated phone into play).

• LeahBoBeah  on  March 1, 2026

  I just love recipe cards. They carry so much history and nostalgia and warmth – I love when my kitchen bestie scrawls something she made for me on a blank card that I can then slip into my collection (I know I’ll think of her always when I read her writing and prepare the dish.) I do store all of my recipes – those I’ve made and want to make – in my Mela app and I do use the app to generate PDFs to create backups in the event of an emergency… I don’t want to lose that convenience and efficiency, however, I cook from a box of handwritten cards that are stained in all the right ways and places. Some are mine, written on glossy Rifle Paper designer cards while others are typed onto index cards by my grandma almost a century ago (or adopted from a collection scavenged from the thrift store.) Vinyl made a comeback not because its the superior method for storing and recording music, but because of the high quality and warmth it gives to music when played. That’s how I see recipe cards and hope they bounce back too.

• Darcie  on  March 1, 2026

  I love the comparison between recipe cards and vinyl records.

• breakthroughc  on  March 1, 2026

  I have a recipe box that I rarely look at as I have electronic copies of anything I have made in the last 15 years. When my Mom passed a few years ago I already had all the recipes I wanted, but I took some of the cards with fond memories and written in my Mom’s handwriting and stuck them in various cookbooks to use as bookmarks. When I come accross one it is a nice memory.

• goodfruit  on  March 2, 2026

  I run a cooking group online, each year we have a Recipe Swap, which must be on paper and sent in the mail, with a card. A few of us actually write the recipe out by hand. Some even use the recipe cards. We look forward to this swap each year.

• FontQueen62  on  March 4, 2026

  I don’t have any of my own recipes, but when I cook a dish from a cookbook I’ll write remarks about it. Most of my cookbooks are from thrift stores and I think it’s great when I see a note written about the recipe by the former owner.

• KarenGlad  on  March 7, 2026

  Remember those tin recipe boxes from back in the 50’s/60’s? I have my mother-in-law’s (recipes included) and have since added 3 more (now they’re full too). My daughter took my 70’s style plastic one when she moved out. My daughter-in-law has her late mother’s box. All contain favourite family recipes old and new and are well used.

• boncie  on  March 8, 2026

  I have a treasured recipe card box with all my favourite recipes. I will always love recipe cards, as when I see my mother’s or my grandmother’s handwriting, it makes me smile and think of treasured memories. A recipe on a tablet or phone doesn’t even come close. I feel that in so many facets of life our humanity is sacrificed for efficiency.

• GenieB  on  March 28, 2026

  I ditched my card box years ago. I took the time to copy all the recipes I wanted to keep to a recipe app. That app has since died and I migrated everything over to another. Now I mostly just copy and paste. I use my IPad while cooking — a little messy at times — but I have a lot of ebook cookbooks as well as saved recipes.

• Jenjeanh  on  March 30, 2026

  Our local used store had for sale a library card catalogue cabinet full of recipe cards. I think it was about 30 drawers and they were full of recipes with the category written on the label inserted into the slot on the outside of the drawer.
  I was really tempted and would have loved going through the cards but couldn’t decide and it was gone next time i went

  I do have a few cards still from 70’s/80’s that I do make from time to time but i remember when I sorted through my collection of cards I got rid of most as the dishes were just not things I’d eat now.
  My faves are those in my Mom’s handwriting