How to scan a cookbook page into a recipe app
Turn a cookbook page, a handwritten card or a recipe clipping into a digital recipe you can search, scale and shop from — using your phone camera.
The recipes you cook most are often the ones stuck on paper: a grandmother's index card, a page in a cookbook you keep flipping to, a clipping in a drawer. They are the hardest to search, the easiest to lose, and the ones you would most hate to lose.
Your phone camera can digitize all of it.
What you can scan
- A cookbook page. Lay it flat and get the whole recipe in frame.
- A handwritten card. Legible handwriting reads fine; genuinely messy
handwriting is hit and miss.
- A magazine or newspaper clipping.
- A screenshot you already took of a recipe.
- A photo of a printed sheet from a class or a friend.
How to do it
In A La Carte:
- Tap the + button and choose Photo.
- Either take a photo or pick one from your camera roll.
- Wait a few seconds while it reads the page.
- Check it, then save.
The result is a real recipe — ingredients as a list, steps numbered, times and temperatures pulled out — not a picture of a recipe. That distinction is the entire point: you can now search it, scale it, add it to a grocery list, and cook from it step by step.
Getting a good scan
The quality of what comes back depends mostly on the photo:
- Flatten the page. A cookbook's curved gutter is the single most common
cause of a garbled ingredient. Press the spine down.
- Even light beats bright light. Avoid a hard shadow across the text, and
watch for your own shadow leaning over the page.
- Fill the frame with the recipe. Do not include the facing page.
- Include everything. If the ingredients are on one page and the method
overleaf, take both — you can add several photos to one recipe.
- Straight on, not at an angle. Skew makes text harder to read.
If a recipe spans a page turn, photograph both pages and import them together rather than as two separate recipes.
Check it before you trust it
Always read an imported recipe once against the original, especially:
- Amounts and units. ¼ and ½ are the most commonly misread characters on a
printed page.
- Oven temperature, and whether the book meant Celsius or Fahrenheit.
- Anything the page implied but never wrote down. Older cookbooks
routinely omit pan sizes and resting times because they assumed you knew.
A La Carte fills in a sensible value rather than leaving a blank when a recipe does not state something — useful, but it is an estimate, so it is worth a look on a recipe you care about.
What about a whole cookbook?
Photographing an entire book one page at a time is a bad use of an evening, and depending on the book it may not be yours to digitize wholesale — scanning your own copy for personal use is one thing, reproducing a book is another.
Scan the ten recipes you actually cook. That is nearly always the real library.
If your recipes are already digital but trapped somewhere else — a PDF, or another recipe app — you do not need the camera at all. A La Carte imports files and exports from other apps directly, which is faster and more accurate than photographing a screen.
After it is in
- Search it by ingredient, so "the one with the buttermilk" is findable.
- Scale it — the amounts inside the instructions change too, not just the
ingredient list.
- Shop from it, minus what is already in your pantry.
- Cook from it in cook mode, so the page does not need to stay open on the
counter.
- Share it as a link, which is a much better way to give a family recipe
to a relative than a photo of a card.
Try it
A La Carte is on iPhone and Android, with a 7-day trial that unlocks everything. Start with the one recipe card you would be genuinely upset to lose.