How to Organize, Clean, and Maintain Cookbooks (2024)

A recipe app or website: If you’re looking for a way to organize your books and recipes so that they’re searchable and stored in one place, a recipe app or website can make your life easier.

Adhesive tabs: We love these Post-it Tabs for flagging the most-used recipes in cookbooks.

A three-ring binder: If you have printed or handwritten recipes and you don’t want to digitize them, you can organize them in a binder.

Plastic sheet protectors: These are great for storing printed recipes or those torn from magazines. If you have loose recipe cards, you can keep them in plastic sheet protectors with pockets. We also recommend getting plastic tab dividers to separate recipes into categories.

Paper towels or a clean cloth: Use a slightly damp paper towel or cloth to remove grease from glossy book covers or dust jackets.

Hinge tape: The pros use various tapes—like this one—for repairing book covers that have started to separate at their hinges.

A ruler: This is best for applying tape to a book’s hinge.

Scissors: You’ll need these for cutting hinge tape or polyester film to the size of your books.

Tape: Use this to wrap book covers (if you’re using clear polyester film).

A bone folder: We like this plastic bone folder for creasing book covers. You could also use a ruler.

Depending on how many cookbooks you have, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to well over an hour to organize your collection. If you mostly use recipes from the internet, we recommend uploading them to your preferred app or website as you use them (as opposed to uploading them all at once). Eventually your recipes will be stored in one place.

If your cookbook covers have a glossy finish, they can be wiped down in just a few minutes. Covering your books with plastic covers is a more labor-intensive and time-consuming endeavor. For larger collections, this could take several hours, so you may want to break up the project over a couple of days.

When it comes to internet recipes, there are lots of apps—such as OrganizEat and Recipe Keeper—that allow you to enter recipe links so they’re stored together and organized into folders. You can also upload pictures of any printed or handwritten recipes, so you don’t have to transcribe each one into the app.

These apps don’t allow you to search your personal cookbook collection, as you can with Eat Your Books, but you can take pictures of recipes from books and save their images. Since your recipes are stored in the app on your phone, you can access them whenever you’re at the grocery store or traveling.

If you have a pile of handwritten recipe cards or clippings from newspapers or magazines, you could photograph them and add them to these apps or websites. Or, if you want to save the hard copies, you could put them in a three-ring binder. Many cooks prefer using paper recipes in the kitchen, instead of staring at a screen on a device. Regular 8½-by-11-inch plastic sheet protectors—or ones specially designed for recipe cards—are great for keeping paper recipes clean. We recommend separating the recipes into categories using plastic tab dividers.

Before you organize your cookbooks, make sure you’re storing them in an appropriate spot. The experts told us that heat and moisture are very damaging to books. So if you want to keep your collection in tip-top shape, the best place for your cookbooks is anywhere other than your kitchen (and preferably away from direct sunlight, which will fade book spines). This will also prevent your books from getting covered in that icky concoction of cooking grease, food splatters, and dust. If you prefer to keep your cookbooks in the kitchen, Slotnick recommends storing them in a low cupboard or on a low shelf, since heat rises.

You should organize cookbooks in a way that makes sense to you. But experts recommend grouping cookbooks by cuisine (such as Indian, Italian, or Mexican), with separate sections for books on specific topics, such as grilling, seafood, or poultry. You can have another section for all-purpose cookbooks that include recipes from a range of cuisines. Food literature, such as chef memoirs or general reference books about cooking, could also be grouped together.

It’s become trendy to arrange books by color. But unless you’re a visual person with an excellent memory, Sartwell said this is a very impractical system for most people.

If you have only a handful of cookbooks, no organization is necessary, though we’d still recommend using multicolor adhesive tabs to mark your favorite recipes. Choosing specific colors for certain dishes—green for vegetables, blue for seafood, yellow for poultry, and so on—makes it easier to quickly spot your go-to recipes in each book.

If you have a lot of cookbooks, many of the pros we spoke with recommend using the website Eat Your Books, which makes searching for recipes easier. After you create a profile and enter the titles of your cookbooks, magazines, and favorite blogs, the site allows you to search your entire collection by a specific dish or ingredient. For instance, if you’re looking for a chocolate cake recipe, it will give you all the sources in your collection that contain one. You can also take pictures of your personal handwritten recipes and add them to your catalog, or you could add ingredients from certain recipes to an online shopping list.

Cookbook pages with the most stains usually indicate that the recipe is pretty good. But if you’re looking to mitigate stains, a cookbook stand with a splatter shield will keep your pages clean.

Glossy cookbook covers or dust jacket covers can be wiped down with a slightly damp paper towel or clean cloth. If the pages are stained with grease or sauce, Sartwell recommends using a dry paper towel to blot off as much of the stain as you can. Leave the book open to let any moisture dry before closing it; otherwise, any batter splattered on the pages will glue them together. Also, food left inside books can attract critters, which you probably don’t want to see in your kitchen.

When it comes to dusting books, Slotnick said she uses a clean, old-school shaving brush to brush the tops of the pages. A clean pastry brush, avacuum cleaner with a handheld attachment, or a handheld vacuum would also work. She recommends holding the book closed and brushing away from the spine, so you don’t push debris deeper into the book.

The experts we spoke with were hesitant to recommend any products for repairing books. It’s always best to let a professional book restorer or binder make repairs to vintage, antique, or family cookbooks, particularly if they have sentimental or historical value. Sartwell told us, “If it’s something that’s a true collectible, it’s a really bad decision to use tape.”

That said, if the cookbooks don’t have historical value, it’s fine to use tape to repair them. Librarians use hinge tape to repair covers that have begun to separate at the hinge. We’ll explain the process below, but this video offers a good tutorial.

Cut the tape ¼ inch shorter than the height of the book. Peel off the backing at the center of the tape, fold the tape around a ruler, and insert it (adhesive side out) into the open book hinge. Use a bone folder or the edge of a ruler to press it down. Peel off the backing on one side of the tape, and burnish it with the side of a ruler or a bone folder. Repeat on the other side of the tape.

Most cookbooks in your home don’t need to be covered. If you do have vintage cookbooks or family recipe books that are meaningful to you, for added protection, cover them in a clear polyester film or book jacket cover with a paper backing (the same kind used in public libraries). After years of handling cookbooks, Slotnick said, “you’ll start to lose the top of the dust jacket and then the book spine starts to split. So covering is a really good way of preserving.” Plastic coverings also make the books easier to wipe down. Note: If you want to cover just one or two books, buying an entire roll of film or a stack of book jacket covers is overkill. So check with your local library first, to see whether it can spare the materials you’ll need.

If you’re looking to purge cookbooks you rarely use, consider donating them to a charity (like Better World Books or Books for Africa), a thrift store, a library, or a used-books vendor. Be sure to call or email the bookseller or library in advance to see whether they’re interested in taking your selection. If they can’t take the titles you have to offer, then showing up with a pile of books is a hassle for you and for the person accepting the donation. You can also check the price of your books on sites like AbeBooks, Alibris, or Biblio and sell them on eBay or Etsy.

If you have vintage cookbooks to sell, don’t be tempted to remove any handwritten notations in the margins of the pages. Additions like these should be left intact because they not only add to the book’s value but provide interesting details about the life of the person who owned them.

This article was edited by Connor Grossman and Ben Frumin.

1. Bonnie Slotnick, owner of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, phone interview, January 21, 2022

2. Matt Sartwell, managing partner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, phone interview, January 26, 2022

3. Kristen J. Nyitray, director of special collections and university archives at Stony Brook University, email interview, January 26, 2022

4. Jason Torre, preservation librarian at Stony Brook University, email interview, January 27, 2022

5. Rebecca Federman, manager of culinary collections for The New York Public Library, phone interview, January 25, 2022