Hearth— A note from the founder —
Before her recipes disappear.
Yahia · 17 · Ottawa
Most of us don't realize how much of who we are is wrapped up in the food someone else made for us — until we go to reach for it one day and realize we don't know how. We have a memory of how it tasted. Maybe a photo. Maybe a few seconds of her voice. Not the recipe. Not the why.
This page is for two kinds of families:
- The ones who still have her, and don't want to be the third or fourth person reaching for a dish she's no longer there to make.
- The ones who already lost her, and want to save what they still have — calls with siblings, scattered memories, the half-remembered way she did things.
Hearth is built for both.
What started it
My grandma — my teta — passed away last year. I knew she was getting older, but I'd grown up around her and her food and the language she spoke at the table, and it didn't occur to me that any of it could ever just stop existing.
The part nobody warns you about isn't the funeral. It's the third or fourth time you reach for a dish that only she made and realize you have no idea how to make it. Sheyera bel'laban. The way she made mahshi. Even the things I watched her cook a hundred times, I never asked the right questions about. I never wrote anything down.
I have one photo of her in the kitchen. A few minutes of her voice on an old WhatsApp note. The rest is gone.
Why this exists
In the months after, I kept thinking about the same thing: there are millions of grandmothers around the world right now whose families are about to lose what I lost. Not the person — that's already a tragedy. The food. The way she said things. The little turn of phrase she had for "add water until it looks right."
The existing options don't work for most families like mine. My mom wouldn't sit and type into a website every week. Most older parents wouldn't either. But a phone call — a real phone call, in her language, where someone asks her about her recipes and actually listens — that would have worked.
So I built Hearth.
What we don't fake
I want to be honest about what this is and what it isn't.
I'm a high school student building this in the open. Hearth is brand new. We don't have years of testimonials or a long list of press hits. The first printed books are arriving in the next few weeks.
What we do have is a real, working process:
- Two short phone calls with your grandmother, in her own language. She doesn't open an app or learn anything new. She just talks.
- A real hardcover with her recipes and her stories, shipped in about thirty days.
- A full refund anytime before her first call. I'm not going to take your money and disappear — and you shouldn't have to wonder whether I will.
That's the whole offer. $99 for first families. After the first volumes land and the people who hold them feel about them the way I think they will, the price will go up. That's the only "first family" thing about it.
Why I'm doing this at 17
I get this question a lot. Honestly: because nobody else built it in time for my grandma. If I wait until I'm older to start, every week that passes is a family who'll never get the chance.
I'm not pretending this is a normal startup story. It isn't. But the work is real, the calls are real, the books are real, and the grief that started it is real.
If any of this resonates with you — and there's someone in your family whose recipes you've never asked about — please don't wait the way I did.← Back to Hearth