Why I still write recipes out by hand

I write for a website, which makes this slightly awkward to admit: my own recipes are on cards in a wooden box on the counter, and I have never once wished they were in an app.

1. A card works when your hands are wet

This sounds trivial. It is not.

Cooking involves wet hands, greasy hands, flour, and a screen that locks every thirty seconds. You end up nudging your phone with a knuckle, or wiping your hands on a towel eleven times, or giving up and guessing.

A card sits propped against a bowl and does not require anything of you. You can also write on it mid-cook, which is the only moment you actually know that the oven runs hot or that it needed ten more minutes.

2. Apps disappear

I have lost recipes to two different apps that shut down, and to one account I could not get back into. In both cases there was no export, or the export was a format nothing else could read.

Paper has no company behind it. Nothing has to keep existing for a card to keep working. That is a genuinely unusual property in 2026 and it is worth something.

I do photograph my cards once a year and keep the photos backed up, which covers fire and flood. Paper first, digital as the copy, not the other way round.

3. The handwriting is the recipe

This is the real reason.

I have a card for a lemon cake in my grandmother's handwriting. It says a good glug of something and until it smells done, and there is a note in the margin in a different pen, added years later, that just says too dry, less flour.

If I typed that out I would have the instructions. I would not have her. The wobble in the letters, the crossing out, the fact that she pressed harder on the word butter. None of that survives a text field, and none of it can be recreated afterwards.

That is the thing about recipes people underestimate. They are one of the very few documents a family produces that record how somebody actually was, written casually, with no idea anyone would keep them.

What I would tell you to do

Call the oldest person in your family and ask them to cook something with you over the phone. Write it down exactly as they say it, vague measures and all. Put their name on the card.

It takes an afternoon and there is no version of this you can do later.

Questions

Is it better to keep recipes on paper or in an app?

Paper as the primary copy, photographs as the backup. Apps close down and accounts get lost, and exports are often impossible or unreadable. A card also works with wet hands and can be written on mid-cook.

What should I write on a recipe card besides the recipe?

The name of the person it came from, roughly the year, when your family eats it, and any notes about what went wrong. Those four things turn instructions into a record.

How do I back up handwritten recipe cards?

Photograph them once a year and keep the photos somewhere backed up. It takes about twenty minutes and it covers the one risk paper genuinely has.