What I wouldn’t give to have some popular cookbooks like Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, Better Homes & Gardens’ New Cook Book, Brown’s Good Eats, America’s Test Kitchen books, or Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street published as recipe cards in 4 x 6 inch index card format.
While their book formats are lovely and lend themselves to lean back aspirational food content, they’re not so great in an actual kitchen. If all the content was on the front of the card, perhaps with those aspirational photos on the back, and a reasonable tabbed index and packaged for sale in a nice cardboard card index box , I’m sure my kitchen life would be far better.
Can one of the recipe giants produce something as functional for use in the kitchen as their recipes?
If they wanted to go crazy, they could also:
- offer a deluxe wooden card index with a thin, angled notch on the top to hold the recipe as an easy display while cooking;
- print the cards in high quality in such a manner as to make them liquid/splash proof or alternately include a reusable plastic sleeve or two for covering the cards while in use in the kitchen;
- add all their “methods” information on individual cards in a separate section;
- number them to allow for cross-indexing them to related recipes or methods (color or textual effects like bold, italics, underlining could also be used to cross-reference these)
Some quick examples in the space:
- There are a handful of publishers doing this in the cocktail space.
- Zola Gregory’s The Pasta Box
- Gold Medal Flour Recipe Boxes (vintage)
- McCalls Great American Recipe Card Collection (vintage)
- Chronicle Books is publishing a Card Catalog: 30 Notecards from the Library of Congress as note cards in a similar format
- Some of the weekly food-in-a-box services like Green Chef and Hello Fresh publish 8.5 x 11″ card stock recipes that come with their food deliveries
Other than these and some magazines that occasionally publish one or two recipe cards, is anyone in the food space already doing this at a bigger scale anymore?
I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone doing this at a larger scale. Hopefully someone will comment below and prove me wrong. But, generationally, I feel most people rely on electronic storage now instead of physical paper cookbooks and cards.
You might want to try /r/cookbooklovers. /r/cookbooks is a little less traveled.