Recipe Card Template

The shape a recipe wants

A title banner, a row for prep time, cook time and servings, then a bulleted ingredients block and numbered method steps. A notes box at the foot can be switched off.

Six to sixteen ingredient lines and four to fourteen steps.

Ingredients in the order you use them

The convention in every published cookbook, and the reason is practical rather than aesthetic.

Use-order means you can work straight down the list while cooking, without scanning back and forth, and it makes the prep obvious because everything for the first stage sits together at the top. Alphabetical order, or the order they occurred to you, forces a search at every single step.

Group by stage where a recipe has them. Sauce ingredients together, not scattered.

Write quantities in one system and be specific

Pick grams or ounces and stay there. A card that mixes the two gets misread eventually, most likely by you.

"One onion" is ambiguous by a factor of three. "One medium onion, about 150g" is not, and the difference matters more in baking, where a recipe written in cups and copied by somebody with a different cup is a recipe that fails for no visible reason.

Method steps: one action each

The numbering is doing work, so use it. A step that contains three verbs will have two of them skipped by whoever is cooking with flour on their hands.

Include the sensory cue rather than only the time. "Fry for 8 minutes until golden and soft" survives a different pan and a different hob; "fry for 8 minutes" does not, and timings are the first thing to go wrong in somebody else's kitchen.

The notes box is where the recipe becomes yours

What went wrong the first time. What you changed. What it goes with, who liked it, how long it keeps, whether it freezes.

That is the information a printed cookbook cannot contain and the reason handwritten recipe cards get passed down. A card with "too salty — use half the stock" written under it is worth more than the original.

Date it and sign it. In thirty years that matters.

Settings and printing

A title, ingredient lines, method steps, and the notes box. A4 or US Letter, printed at 100%.

Print on card if the recipe is going into a box or a kitchen drawer — paper does not survive a kitchen. Laminating is the other option, though you lose the ability to add to the notes, which is the part that matters most later.