our story
One kitchen, five different plates.
It started with a Sunday lunch where nobody could eat the same thing.
01 — the problem
A Sunday lunch in five versions.
Sara’s mother was visiting. Her brother had brought his new partner — vegan, nut-allergic. Their best friend, recently diagnosed coeliac, had stopped accepting dinner invitations entirely. The toddler was in a phase of refusing dairy. And Marco, somewhere between the oven and the worktop, was on his fourth attempt at a single roast that nobody could eat together.
It wasn’t a lack of recipes that was the problem. It was that every cookbook gave you one version of one dish — and the moment somebody at the table couldn’t eat it, you were on your own. Substituting on the fly. Hoping the texture would hold. Watching it not hold.
By the time everyone sat down, the lasagne had separated, the gluten-free crust hadn’t risen, and the whole thing had taken six hours. Nobody complained. But Sara wrote on the back of an envelope that night: there has to be a better way to cook for everyone.
02 — the obsession
Three years in the kitchen.
Marco had spent fifteen years cooking professionally — pastry kitchens in Modena, restaurant lines in London, a brief failed bakery in his twenties. Sara had a background in food science and a stack of cookery books taller than the toddler. They started small: take one recipe, write it the way it was meant to be cooked, then rebuild it five different ways.
What followed was three years of testing. Not just swapping flour for almond flour and calling it gluten-free. Rebuilding the dish. Working out why the original held together, and finding a different route to the same result. Why butter creates that particular crumb in shortbread, and what cold-pressed olive oil does instead. Why eggs bind, and what flax does that aquafaba doesn’t.
Every recipe was tested at least three times for each adaptation. The ones that didn’t work — and there were plenty — got thrown out. Only the ones that actually held up made it into the boxes.
“We didn’t want to make a separate cookbook for every diet. We wanted one card that gave you the original — and then, on the back, every way you might need to adapt it.”
— Sara & Marco, founders
03 — the object
Why a card, not a book..
The first version was a printed book. A very nice one. But nobody used it the way we’d hoped — books sit on shelves; recipes need to be on the worktop next to the bowl. So we cut it up. One recipe, one card. Front and back. Heavy stock, designed to be smudged with butter and flour and tomato sauce, dried off, and used again.
The boxes themselves are a tribute to the recipe boxes our grandmothers used to keep on the kitchen counter — handwritten cards, pulled out one at a time, passed between friends. We kept the form. We just made the recipes adapt for everyone now invited to the table.
Six themed boxes. 168 recipes in total. Each card flips. Each card adapts. Every version actually works.
the people behind it
Sara & Marco.
Sara
Co-founder · food science
Background in food science with a particular obsession for textures, hydration ratios, and why a substitution that should work on paper sometimes doesn’t. Writes most of the adaptations and runs the testing kitchen.
Marco
Co-founder · head of recipe
Fifteen years of pastry and restaurant kitchens before Sunday lunch broke him. Now writes the original recipes, leads a small team of testers, and still does most of the dishwashing.
With love from our kitchen to yours,
— Sara & Marco
Now it's your turn.
Pick a box, build a custom edition, or just browse the recipes. Every one comes with five tested adaptations, so the table can finally eat together.