Thinking of developing a family cookbook for a reunion or holiday gift? Here's the advice I offered attendees in a class I gave at the Honolulu Writers Conference last year.

With e-mail, digital photography and desktop publishing, these projects are much easier to do than they once were. In fact, if you've got a techie in the family, you might want to skip the printed book altogether and create a family recipe Web site.

Begin a year before your ideal publication date. (Sounds like a lot of time, but it isn't — dealing with multiple contributors is like herding cats, and you've got to leave time for processing all the material.) You might want to schedule a meeting at your next family gathering, or you can do the whole thing by mail and e-mail.

After family members have bought into the idea, cement plans: assign duties, begin to gather recipes and pictures. Draw in younger members to handle the technology, such as recording elders' food memories with digital tape recorders or building a computerized database. Develop a format so that the recipes will be uniform in style and easy to follow. I highly recommend consulting "The Recipe Writers' Handbook, Revised and Updated" by Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane Baker (Wiley, paperback, $24.95); it's a food editor's bible.

One issue to settle is whether the recipes will be tested. My judgment: Absolutely. Even though Auntie Martha has been making her coconut banana bread since The Flood, there's no guarantee that it will work for anyone else unless someone tries it without Auntie at their side. It's very common for people to record recipes incorrectly, to be too vague in their instructions or to make assumptions (Auntie may think everyone knows what size loaf pan to use). Stress that people need to be very specific in their instructions. (What size can? What size pan? Etc.)

Recruit a testing team so no single person has to do all the work or buy all the ingredients; each would commit to test a certain number of recipes in a certain time frame.

When developing or testing recipes, it's vital to write everything down — it's too easy to forget what you've learned in the course of testing. I use a recipe testing worksheet, a simple document I built in Microsoft Word; I just print out a copy and scribble as I cook (you should see what some of these look like after I've splashed them with grease, tomato sauce, shoyu and all).

The form records the date of the test, the name of the recipe, the ingredients, the source of the recipe (and their contact information so I can call if I run into trouble halfway through), the ingredients and procedure, with plenty of space for notes. I write down everything I do, the size of every can or package, what works and doesn't work, ideas for improvements, trouble spots, ideas for variations and so on. Sometimes I even attach labels so I can recall what brand I used, or exactly how much of an ingredient.

Above all, enjoy the project and the opportunity to get to know your family better.

Send recipes and queries to Wanda A. Adams, Food Editor, Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Fax: 525-8055. E-mail: wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.

For more information about our 150th anniversary cookbook, call 535-8189 (message phone; your call will be returned). You can order the cookbook online.