— Indian family cookbooks —

Preserve your Indian family recipes — before they're gone.

Hearth is building a way to capture the recipes your Nani or Dadi has been making for forty years, in her own voice, and bind them into a hardcover cookbook your grandchildren will keep.

The Indian kitchen

Indian home cooking is layered with technique that takes lifetimes to master: the order of the spices, the precise toast on the cumin, the moment to add the onions. Nani learned from her mother, in a kitchen with no recipe books.

The cooking comes from from Punjab to Tamil Nadu, Gujarat to Bengal — twenty-eight states, hundreds of regional cuisines. The diaspora carries it from Mumbai to London, New York, Dubai, Singapore, Toronto — Indian families carry the recipes through generations of migration.

What gets lost

When a Indian matriarch stops cooking, what disappears first is the order of the masala, the precise toast on the spices, the proportion of yogurt to spice in the marinade. The recipe card, if it exists, lists ingredients but not technique. The way she shaped the dough — that lives in her hands, and it doesn't transfer to paper.

That's the part Hearth captures. Not the ingredient list — anyone can find that. The way she does it.

How it works

What we don't do

We don't ask her to type. We don't send her an app. We don't make her sit at a computer. The whole work happens on a phone call she answers in her own kitchen, while she's making tea or peeling something or sitting in her usual chair.

She just talks. We listen, we draft, and the recipes — and the stories behind them — become a book you can hold.