Generation Recipes
Her handwriting stays
her handwriting.
Photograph a recipe card and it is kept exactly as it is — the ink, the spatters, the way she wrote oleo because that is what it said on the box. Then we read the words off the card, so you can search for it and cook from it without the card ever changing.
Three ways in
- Photograph the card
- Front and back if it runs over. The card is saved first, before anything is read from it — so a bad reading costs you a transcription, never the photograph.
- Paste a link
- The recipe comes across. The childhood anecdote, the eleven adverts and the pop-up asking you to subscribe do not.
- Or just type it
- Some recipes only exist in someone's head. Those go in the same box as the rest.
What happens to the card
Nothing. That is the point. Reading a card adds words next to it — it never edits, replaces or tidies the photograph, and it never overwrites anything you typed yourself.
The reading is a suggestion, and you see it before it is kept. Handwriting defeats machines sometimes, and cursive from 1978 defeats them more often than not — so when a word comes out wrong you fix it, and when a card is beyond reading you leave the words empty and cook from the photograph, the way you were going to anyway.
Then you cook from it
Cook mode keeps the screen awake, because nobody wants to wake a phone with butter on their hands. Tick ingredients off as they go in; the ticks clear themselves when you leave, so the recipe is clean the next time.
And pass it on
Everyone in your household opens the same box, so a recipe added after dinner is there before breakfast. And any recipe can be sent to anyone as a link they can simply read — no account, no sign-up, no app. If that is how you got here, you already know it works.
The recipes worth keeping are already written down.
They are just in a drawer.