— Korean family cookbooks —

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

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

The Korean kitchen

Korean home cooking is built on banchan — the dozens of small side dishes that anchor every meal. Halmoni's kimchi has been fermenting in the same crock for thirty years. The recipe is in her hands, not on paper.

The cooking comes from from Seoul to Busan, Jeju to Gangneung — recipes shaped by seasons and the fermentation calendar. The diaspora carries it from Seoul to Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Sydney — Korean families carry the recipes across diaspora generations.

What gets lost

When a Korean matriarch stops cooking, what disappears first is the salt ratio in the kimchi brine, the marinade for the galbi, how thin to cut the meat for bulgogi. 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.