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Project Details
Project Details
The product
The product
Hechts' Kitchen: Family Recipes and Stories is the second edition of a basic family cookbook that I had made when I was in college. This new version would be the "professional" version: in color, with photographs of the recipes, and would also showcase stories and artwork from the family.
The team
The team
1 project lead (me), 1 web designer (my brother Michael), and various family members who tested recipes and proofread the manuscript
My role
My role
I managed the project, herding all the cats involved. I collaborated with Michael on the design, compiled and edited the recipes, made drawings, wrote recipe notes and family stories, and tested and photographed recipes.
Constraints
Constraints
I also had a full-time job, so this project was completed entirely on nights and weekends.
Timeline
Timeline
September 2015 – June 2017
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Introduction
Background
Background
When I moved into my very first college apartment, I was cooking for myself for the first time in my life. I had cooked with my mother when I was at home, but I didn't have her recipes written down anywhere, and I had to call home constantly to ask her questions. We had a lot of excellent cooks among the extended family, and I began to think that someone should compile a family cookbook and collect everything for posterity. So I did.
First edition
First edition
In the first version of the cookbook, compiled in Microsoft Word over my summer vacation, everything was very simply laid out in plain text (in Comic Sans, no less!). There were no photos of the food. I called it A Taste of Home, because that's what making my family's recipes meant to me when I was away at college, and that's what I wanted it to be for everyone else.
I printed a bunch of copies on our home printer and spiral-bound them at Staples, for all the relatives who wanted them. And people used it. And they loved it! Even my grandmother used it to check things on recipes she had made hundreds of times before! And relatives kept giving me more recipes "for Version Two."
Second edition
Second edition
I wanted the second edition to be far more professional-looking than the first version, to include more recipes, to have pictures this time, and fun family stories about food. It turned out the name A Taste of Home was already a published series of cookbooks, so I had to change it. My boyfriend at the time suggested the name Hechts' Kitchen, to be sort of a play on "Hell's Kitchen." Not the most obvious of puns, but I liked it.
Designing A Cookbook
Designing A Cookbook
Recipes
Recipes
I already had a collection of recipes from the first version of the cookbook, but after that was distributed, my relatives were eager to contribute more recipes. Because we had so many recipes to include, we decided to aim for a fairly compact design, to keep the cookbook from getting too long.
Layout
Layout
After playing with a couple different layouts we settled on a 2-column design. The ingredients would be in a colored box, to make them stand out, with instructions in the second column alongside them. Not all recipes had a photo, but for those that did, we placed the picture diagonally from the ingredient box, to keep things feeling balanced.
Michael built the pages in InDesign.
Typography
Typography
Though the entirety of the first cookbook was in Comic Sans (hey, it seemed fun at the time), we used two fonts for version 2: a sans-serif font for headings, titles, stories, and notes, and a serif font for recipe ingredients and instructions.
We used dotted lines to separate recipes, and wavy lines as a divider between stories.
Color
Color
I wanted each section of the cookbook to have its own color. That way, if you opened it to a random page, you'd be able to recognize what section you were in.
Here you can see all the colors lined up on the table of contents.
Stories
Stories
We sprinkled family stories related to food throughout the cookbook. Longer stories bookended each section, and shorter ones were interspersed between recipes. Along with the artwork, this helped keep things from feeling too cramped.
We used wavy line as dividers to separate out the stories.
Useful tips
Useful tips
In accordance with the theme of the family cookbook being a resource for kids going off to college, I collected lessons the younger generation had learned once we started cooking for ourselves. I.e., the things we learned in college that were actually useful for real life.
Artwork
Artwork
Because we have so many creative people in the family, I wanted to showcase artwork throughout the cookbook. Along with the stories, this helped keep things from feeling too cramped. Michael made gorgeous cover art, shown above. I drew much of the interior artwork.
Testing and proofing
Testing and proofing
Testing recipes was a time-consuming, but important, process. My mother and my cousins helped immensely with this, otherwise it would have taken much longer. This also gave us opportunities to photograph the finished dishes.
Two heads are better than one when it comes to proofreading, and my mother was that second head. We found and corrected lots of typos. Some of them were actually pretty amusing, so I decided to compile them into a fake recipe.
There are always going to be things you miss, no matter how many times you proofread. One I found post-publication is the only one that I regret having missed, because it would have been a good addition to this recipe. On one page I wrote "out house" instead of "our house."
Publishing
Publishing
Printing and binding
Printing and binding
Since I worked at a publisher, I had some extremely fortuitous connections with professional book printers, and was able to get a good price on printing the cookbook. I chose coated paper, which is pretty commonly used among cookbooks. It was also important to me that the cookbook be spiral-bound, even though this cost more. I hate when you have to weight a cookbook open, as opposed to a spiral binding, which stays open for ease of use.
eBook
eBook
Though the cookbook was intended for family and friends, Michael and I decided to list is on Amazon for sale as an eBook, just for the heck of it. We discovered that this is difficult to do for cookbooks, since all the careful formatting would be lost on conversion to Kindle format. Rather than allowing this and losing our design, we decided to list it as an ePub book only (which is similar to a PDF). So none of the cross-reference links work, but at least it looks good! It is available for purchase here on Amazon today. Though I have a hard copy in my kitchen, I also have the eBook on my phone so I can check on ingredients I need when I'm at the market.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Responses
Responses
“Enjoying the cookbook! Especially the bits and pieces of family life that you've woven in here and there." – cousin
"Wonderful cookbook!!!" – cousin
"[The cookbook is] just beautiful and the writing very engaging!! Makes me want to start cooking..." – family friend
"When are you going to make a version 3?" – everyone
What I learned
What I learned
People do their best work on projects they are passionate about. Everyone was so enthusiastic about helping, and even though it was taking up my precious free time, it never felt like a chore to work on it.
Next steps
Next steps
I made the cookbook for my family, and though I never intended to market it, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. It's a project I'm still incredibly proud of. Who knows, I might still take it around to local bookstores and see if they stock books by local authors.
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