— Polish family cookbooks —

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

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

The Polish kitchen

Polish home cooking is generous, hearty, and tied to the calendar — every saint's day, every wedding, every Christmas Eve has its dish. Babcia learned from her mother, who survived a war on those recipes.

The cooking comes from from Kraków to Warsaw, Gdańsk to Lublin — recipes shaped by long winters and Catholic feast days. The diaspora carries it from Warsaw to Chicago, Toronto, London, Berlin — Polish families brought the recipes through emigration and exile.

What gets lost

When a Polish matriarch stops cooking, what disappears first is the exact pinch on the pierogi edge (three, never four), the fermentation time for the żurek, the proportion of cabbage to meat in the gołąbki. 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.