Cookbooks: the hardest easy book to make
A novel is one long stream of text, and the typesetter's job is to pour it well. A cookbook is a few hundred small documents with identical internal structure, each of which has to work on its own page while somebody is holding a knife. That is a different job, and it is why cookbooks cost more to make than their page count suggests.
The anatomy of a recipe
Every recipe is the same shape, and readers rely on it. Deviating is not style, it is friction.
- Title. What the dish is, in the words someone would look for.
- Headnote. Optional, short. Where it came from, why it works, what to serve it with. This is where the author's voice lives; nowhere else in the recipe wants a voice.
- Yield. How many it serves, or how much it makes.
- Timing. Preparation time and cooking time, separated, plus anything unattended — resting, chilling, proving — called out on its own, because that is the number that ruins a dinner when it is buried in step 4.
- Ingredients, listed in the order they are used, grouped by component when there is more than one (the sauce, the topping), with quantity first.
- Method, in numbered steps. One action or one tight cluster per step, so a cook can look away and find their place again.
- Notes and variations, after the method. Substitutions, storage, what to do with the leftovers.
Keep that order identical in every recipe in the book. A reader learns the pattern in the first ten pages and then navigates by position rather than by reading.
It is read standing up, at arm's length, with wet hands
This single fact decides the typography. The reader is not in an armchair eighteen inches from the page. They are across the counter, glancing down between tasks, and they will not pick the book up to squint at it.
Set the type larger than you would a novel, and the numbered steps larger still, since those are what gets read mid-task. Contrast has to be total: near-black text on near-white paper. Light gray body text, type reversed out of a photograph, or a tinted panel behind small text all fail at arm's length under kitchen lighting, however good they look on screen.
Separate the ingredient list and the method clearly, so the eye returns to the right one, and set generous leading in the steps — a cook who loses their line has to re-read the whole step to find out whether the salt went in.
Cookbook pages are designed, not flowed
Here is the structural problem. A recipe that splits across a page turn makes the cook stop, dry their hands and turn the page, usually at the worst moment. So the rule is that a recipe fits on a page, or on a facing pair where all of it is visible at once.
Pouring text into a template will not achieve that, because the text does not cooperate: one recipe has six ingredients and four steps, the next has twenty-two ingredients and a sub-component. Cookbook interiors are laid out recipe by recipe, and the author helps by writing to fit — trimming a headnote by two lines, merging two short steps, moving a variation into the notes.
Decide the unit early. A one-recipe-per-page book and a one-recipe-per-spread book with a full-page photograph opposite are different books with very different page counts, and page count sets the spine.
Ingredient lists and the fraction problem
Quantities have to line up down the left of the list, and keep lining up when the entries are "1/2 tsp", "200 g", "1 1/2 cups" and "2 tbsp, plus more for the pan". Set the quantities as a column rather than letting them ride in front of a ragged block of names, and check what your typeface does with fractions — a real fraction glyph and a typed one look nothing alike stacked in a list.
Quantities must also never break. "200 g" split across a line ending is genuinely misread, and so is a range like "4-6": use a non-breaking space between a number and its unit, and keep ranges intact. Accented ingredient names are the other place things go missing; see Accents, symbols and characters that go missing.
In the Interior Formatter. Inline images, full-page plates, bleed images and two-page spreads are all supported, and every image is checked against the size it will actually print at — so a photo that will land soft on a full page is flagged before you order a proof, not after. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
The photographs, honestly
Photography is what sells cookbooks. It is also the most expensive part of making one, usually by a wide margin: a shoot means a photographer, a food stylist, props, ingredients bought several times over, and days of work for a fraction of the recipes.
Then it costs again on every copy. A color interior raises the manufacturing cost of each book, and on print on demand it raises it enough to change what you have to charge. The trade is set out in Color inside the book, and what it costs — read it before you commit, because the question is not "do I want photographs" but "does this book still price sensibly with them".
There is a middle path most authors skip past: a black-and-white cookbook, designed that way from the start. Line drawings, one strong photograph per section rather than per recipe, generous white space, confident typography. Plenty of respected cookbooks look like this. What does not work is shooting in color and converting at the end — color photographs turned gray go muddy and flat, and a book of them reads as a color book printed badly.
If you do want color, shoot fewer dishes and shoot them well. Twenty excellent photographs beat a hundred adequate ones, and cost less.
The back matter is what makes it useful
Two indexes, or one index with two ways in. Readers come at a cookbook from both directions: they look up a dish by name, and they look up an ingredient because they have a bag of it going soft. An index by ingredient is the one people actually use, and the one most self-published cookbooks leave out. Both are built against final page numbers, so they come last — see Does your nonfiction book need an index?.
A conversion table, if anyone outside your own country will buy it. Cups to grams, Fahrenheit to Celsius, and the oven-temperature equivalents including gas marks. One page at the back removes the single biggest reason an international reader abandons a recipe.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Back to: Setting poetry without wrecking it · More: Putting images inside a book · Color inside the book, and what it costs · Type size, leading and the line that reads well