How to Make a Ward or Church Cookbook (Without Chasing 40 People for Recipes)

A ward or church cookbook is one of the few projects where everyone gets to contribute something and everyone goes home with something. It is also the project where one volunteer ends up chasing forty people for recipes for six months. This guide is written for that volunteer: how to collect recipes from a whole congregation, keep it on schedule, and end with a book people cook from for years.

1. Decide what the book is for

Settle this in the first meeting, because it changes every later decision:

• A keepsake — a book members keep for the recipes and the names in it. Optimize for completeness and stories.
• A gift — for a departing bishop or pastor, a ward anniversary, or new move-ins. Optimize for a fixed deadline.
• A fundraiser — copies sold at a markup. Optimize for price per copy and quantity.

Most congregations want a keepsake that pays for itself. That usually means a sturdy, affordable edition for everyone and a few nicer copies for the people being honored.

2. Make contributing take two minutes

Group cookbooks stall when contributing feels like homework. The fix is to remove every step between "I'll send you my recipe" and the recipe actually arriving:

1. Send one link, not an email address. People should be able to add a recipe from their phone in the hall after church.
2. Let people photograph a recipe card instead of typing it. Kindred Cook reads handwritten and printed cards with AI and turns them into an editable recipe.
3. Ask for exactly two recipes per household: their most-requested dish and the one they bring to ward dinners.

3. Use the organization you already have

You don't need to chase forty people yourself. Ask the Relief Society, Elders Quorum, Primary, and youth leaders (or your parish's ministries) to each own one chapter and collect from their own group. A short announcement in sacrament meeting or the bulletin, with the link and a date, does more than any number of reminder emails.

4. Set a deadline and print a progress number

Pick a finish date tied to something real: a ward Christmas party, a pioneer day dinner, the bishop's release. Six weeks of collecting is plenty. Then announce progress weekly — "62 recipes from 31 families so far" — because nobody wants to be the household that isn't in the book.

5. Organize it the way your congregation eats

Skip the generic template. Chapters that work well for ward and church cookbooks:

• Funeral potatoes and other dishes for when someone needs a meal
• Ward dinner and potluck favorites, scaled for a crowd
• Youth camp and trek recipes
• Holiday table
• Recipes from our oldest members, in their own handwriting

That last chapter is the one people treasure. A scanned card in a grandmother's handwriting is worth more than any food photo.

6. Keep a 200-recipe book affordable

Congregation cookbooks are big, and print cost follows page count. A compact layout that stacks several recipes per page keeps a 200-recipe book to a size that is cheap to print and easy to hold. Kindred Cook's Compact layout does this automatically, and its Community Edition is a coil-bound 7×10 book that lies flat on the counter, at $39 a copy.

7. Order one copy before you order forty

Print one proof and pass it around the committee. Someone will spot the misspelled name or the recipe that ended up in the wrong chapter. Fixing it before the full order is free; fixing it after is not.

8. Give every contributor a copy

The simplest way to fund the book is to make it the thing people already want: a copy with their own recipe in it. Collect orders while you collect recipes, so the final print count is known before the deadline.

Kindred Cook is free for collecting and organizing the whole congregation's recipes, with no minimum order when it is time to print. Start your ward or church cookbook today and send the link this Sunday — the collecting takes longer than the printing.