Our story

A book my father wrote.
For my daughter.

The Kookbook by Popsie & Gillian — the original paperback

The original Kookbook

Poppie — the cook of our family.

I grew up watching my father — Poppie — cook for our family. He’s the one who taught me. I cook his recipes for my own kids now, and they’ve started cooking them too: the same flavours, the same way, the same things he was making when I was their age.

A few years ago we immigrated, and my parents stayed behind. The thing I didn’t realise I’d miss so badly was just sitting around the table eating Poppie’s food. My eldest daughter missed this too, prompting her to ask her grandfather to write his recipes down — and so he did. A paperback he made himself, called the Kookbook. That’s where this app started.

Sometimes on special occasions we cook the same meal, thousands of kilometres apart, and eat together over a video call. The flavours and smells perfectly aligned.

Why this exists

Cooking and sharing food with the people you love is one of the most fundamentally human things we do. Long before kitchens, tribes gathered around a fire to cook, eat, and tell stories. It’s how families bond and how the day winds down — it’s wired into us.

And it runs deeper than habit. The smell of something your mom or gran used to make can take you straight back to being a child. Those flavours and smells live deep in our psyche; comfort food comforts because of the people and the memories baked into it.

Modern life — most of all the phones at the table — is quietly eroding that. We sit together but look elsewhere. We eat without really eating together, and a little of what makes us human slips away with it.

This app is a small push back: to keep your family’s recipes alive, to cook them together even when you’re apart, and to put the phones down and come back to the simple, healthy fundamentals — good food and the people around the table.

“A line from Poppie — Dylan to provide.”

— Poppie

Start your family’s cookbook

Recipes outlast the people who made them — but only if someone writes them down. This is where you do that.

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