About the archive

Handwritten recipe cards turn up by the boxful at estate sales. They are bought for a couple of dollars, or thrown out. Each one was written by somebody, usually more than once, and usually for someone else. Nothing about them is rare enough to be collected and nothing about them is worthless enough to deserve the bin.

This is somewhere to put them. Every card is photographed, read, typed up so it can be searched, and kept next to the scan of the original so the handwriting survives even after the card does not.

How the cards are read

A vision model does the first pass, and a person checks every single card before it appears here. Nothing is published automatically.

The transcription keeps the card’s own wording. If it says 1 c. oleo, the archive says 1 c. oleo — not 1 cup margarine. A modern reading is offered alongside it for anyone who actually wants to cook from the card, but the original phrasing is the thing being preserved and it is never quietly corrected.

Plenty of cards list ingredients and no method at all, or give a time like “bake til done”. Those gaps are left as gaps. Filling them in with something plausible would make the archive more useful and less true, which is the wrong trade.

About the people

Where we know who wrote a card, they get a page. Some of these people are alive. Every profile is reviewed before publication, and anyone can ask for one to be corrected or taken down without explaining themselves to us first.

When a card’s author is unknown — which is most of them, from estate sales — we record where it came from instead. A box bought in Dayton in 2024 is not an attribution, but it is more honest than a blank.

Adding to it

Anyone can add a card. No account needed. If you have a whole box, get in touch — that is exactly what this is for.