A family recipe book that won’t get lost or fade

Paper yellows, ink fades, and there is only one copy, usually sitting in a kitchen drawer at one relative’s house. A move or a kitchen leak is all it takes to lose recipes collected over decades.

A photo of the card keeps something typed text never will: the handwriting, the crossings-out, and the notes like “let it cool first!” That’s why it’s worth keeping both, a photo of the original and text you can comfortably read while you cook.

In a paper notebook, the gingerbread recipe is “somewhere near the back.” In a digital one, you type “gingerbread” and it’s right there. Search looks through the names, text, and tags of your recipes.

• Categories organize recipes the way you want: soups, baking, holidays.
• Favorites gather what you cook most often in one place.
• Recipes from the web go into the same book. See how to save recipes from other sites.

You can’t split a paper notebook between siblings. A recipe in the app goes out as a link: your sister, grandson, or cousin opens it on their phone and can save their own copy. The guide to sharing recipes with family walks through it step by step.

Recipes in MyRecipeDrawer are private. They don’t show up in search engines and other users can’t see them. At any time you can also go to Settings and download a copy of all your recipes as a single text file to keep on your own computer.