— Italian family cookbooks —

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

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

The Italian kitchen

Italian home cooking isn't one thing — it's twenty regional traditions, each tied to a specific village. Nonna's recipes are usually her mother's, who learned from her mother, in a kitchen the size of a closet.

The cooking comes from from Sicily to Piedmont, with twenty regional cuisines as different from each other as nations. The diaspora carries it from Palermo to Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Toronto — wherever Italian families went, the recipes traveled with them.

What gets lost

When a Italian matriarch stops cooking, what disappears first is the exact pinch of salt, the moment to stop stirring, the brand of tomatoes she always insisted on. 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.