— Vietnamese family cookbooks —

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

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

The Vietnamese kitchen

Vietnamese home cooking is balanced — sour, salt, sweet, bitter, umami all present in every meal. The broth for phở simmers for a full day. The fish sauce that finishes it has to be the right one.

The cooking comes from from Hà Nội to Sài Gòn, with northern, central, and southern traditions that differ dramatically. The diaspora carries it from Hồ Chí Minh City to Westminster, Houston, Paris, Sydney — Vietnamese families carry the recipes across diaspora generations.

What gets lost

When a Vietnamese matriarch stops cooking, what disappears first is the proportion of fish sauce to lime, the precise hours for the phở broth, which brand of rice paper for the gỏi cuốn. 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.