Hi, I’m Ashley Rella
What started as a passion project to collect and preserve my own family’s recipes became something much larger: an archival project dedicated to preserving history that might otherwise be lost.
I began with the recipes, but quickly realized the recipe was only part of the story.
So much of what we know about our families lives in ordinary places—in kitchens, around tables, in handwritten notes and stained recipe cards, in stories told while someone’s hands are busy making something they’ve made a hundred times before. There are techniques no one ever wrote down, traditions we assume we’ll always remember, and entire histories held by the people who fed us.
I started The Food Stories Project because I want to capture those things while we still can.
I want to preserve not only what people cooked, but who they were, how they lived, what they knew, and what they passed along—often without realizing they were doing it.
My Approach
Every family has a different story, so every collection is created differently.
I curate each project around the people involved and what the family wants to remember and preserve. I may come into your kitchen and record someone cooking, sit at the table and collect their stories, photograph the tools and objects they use every day, or gather old photographs, handwritten recipes, videos, and family ephemera.
I’m interested in what happens around the recipe, too: the way someone measures without measuring, the pan they always use, the ingredient they quietly substitutes, the stories that surface while something simmers, and the details a traditional recipe would never capture.
From those pieces, I create a beautiful, personal recipe and family archive designed to be kept, shared, and passed down.
No two projects look exactly alike because no two families do.
My goal is to preserve the person behind the recipes and the life behind the kitchen—to understand not just what they made, but how they did what they did.