cookthis.recipes

Give somebody a book they’ll actually cook from.

cookthis is a small Mac app for turning family recipes into a coil-bound book that lies flat on the kitchen counter — a book to be used, not browsed. Typed in an evening, made to be handed down.

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Free · no account · your recipes never leave your Mac

Apple Dumplings
Cook 55 min•Serves 4 to 6

Granny Smith apples have a tartness that balances the sweet, but any apple will do — don’t be afraid to experiment.

Ingredients
2 sticks(1 cup) salted butter, plus more for greasing the pan
2Granny Smith apples
2 cans(8 oz each) refrigerated crescent roll dough
1½ cupssugar
1 tspvanilla extract
8 ozcitrus-flavored soda, such as Mountain Dew (about ½ of a 12-oz can)
Cinnamon, for sprinkling
2
Directions
1Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9-by-13-inch pan.
2Peel and core the apples, then cut each into 8 slices. Roll each apple slice in a crescent roll piece and transfer to the prepared pan.
3Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the sugar, and barely stir. Add the vanilla and stir slightly, then pour the entire mixture over the apples.
4Pour the citrus soda around the edges of the pan. Sprinkle with cinnamon and bake until golden brown and crispy on top, about 40 minutes.
5Serve, spooning some of the sweet sauce from the pan over the top.
3

Every recipe is a spread: ingredients on the left, directions on the right, and room left over for notes in your own hand. Nothing continues onto a page you’d have to flip to with wet fingers. And notice what’s missing — nobody is going to ask you to photograph your food.

A purpose-built layout.

There are no templates to fight with. The typography is already handled — real fractions, balanced columns, a table of contents that fills itself in. You type the recipe; the book takes care of being beautiful.

It lies flat.

Coil binding and a 6×9 page mean the book stays open next to the stove without a paperweight. This is a reference book for the kitchen counter, not a coffee-table book — it should expect to get splattered.

Less effort than Word.

Most family recipe projects die in a word processor. Here there is nothing to format and nothing to set up: no account, no sign-in. The first book ever made with cookthis — seventeen recipes — went from empty to printable in a couple of hours.

How it works

1

Type in your recipes.

Title, ingredients, directions — and the story that goes with it. The little note about whose recipe it was is the part your family will read first. Soon, a stack of old recipe cards won’t slow you down either: photograph them and get instant first drafts to review instead of typing from scratch.

2

Preview the book anytime.

One click builds the full book as a PDF in about a second — cover, index, page numbers, all of it. What you see is exactly what gets printed.

3

Print it.

Order coil-bound copies from a print service for about the price of a paperback, or take the PDF anywhere you like. The file is yours.

It’s genuinely free.

Unlimited recipes, unlimited books, full PDF export — free, with no account and no catch. Printed copies are the print shop's business, not ours: you pay them directly, about the price of a paperback per copy, and we take no cut. Later, one optional convenience will cost money: turning photos of old recipe cards or printouts into instant first drafts. Everything you can do by typing stays free.

Your family already has the recipes.
Give them the book.

People were sharing recipes long before anyone was sharing links.

macOS 14 or later · free