Stories of culinary heritage are seeped in memory and family lore

In a country like India with a myriad regional and familial influences on heritage food, diversity is the hero

While the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns acted as a catalyst for entire generations to step back into the kitchen, it brought with it its own search for one’s roots. The kitchen, in an Indian household, is considered to be the heart of the home and the memories that emanate from there are often the richest. Therefore, no search for our heritage is complete without revisiting our memories and recipes of the food we have grown up with.

Sensorial memories of your grandmother making your favourite dish for your birthday or your mother baking a cake are unparalleled in most of our minds. In the process of replicating them, we might achieve the perfect results at times but at other times, they leave us amiss. But this shouldn’t be of much surprise as we live in a country where even the way in which the humble dal is tempered changes with almost every zip code and there is no one way of cooking anything. Therefore, any “heritage” recipe can be highly subjective, even if the closest we can get to our roots is by retracing the hands that fed us and their stories.

Food and memory

For chef Anahita Dhondy, her earliest memories are associated with the kitchen. “I have grown up in the kitchen and since my mother has been a home-chef for as long as I can remember, I would spend my days tasting whatever was being cooked,” says Dhondy, whose book The Parsi Kitchen: A Memory of Food & Family recapitulates some of these stories along with recipes that she has learnt from her mother Nilufer.

Similarly, chef and restaurateur Asma Khan–who founded the restaurant Darjeeling Express in London–recounts how the tastes and memories of her home kitchen helped her cook the first dish she ever made when she was a newly married, home-sick wife in Cambridge. “The first dish I ever made was Shammi Kebab and despite not having ever cooked before, I could do it because I had spent so much time in my kitchen while growing up. The smells, sounds and the taste of all the food helped me replicate those dishes,” shares Khan, whose book Ammu: Indian Home-Cooking to Nourish Your Soul is her attempt at recording her mother’s recipes for posterity. However, both Khan and Dhondy are of the opinion that just like memory surrounding food can be subjective, so can the association between heritage food and the authenticity of the “cuisine” it belongs to.

Meanwhile, food historian Pritha Sen recounts how her childhood was spent eating food that was a mix of her East Bengal heritage and of northern influences from when her grandparents settled in New Delhi. “The emphasis was always on ingredients and never spicing things up for flavour. In my family, the cooking always had to be by way of finesse and lightness,” says Sen, whose mother, Amita Sen, used her German patisserie and delicatessen training to also cook up a storm, albeit a delicious one.

Authenticity versus adaptation

The myriad influences, as recounted above, on our heritage recipes, therefore, beg the question of what an authentic recipe is. “The way I look at it is that while the source of a recipe could be authentic by the way it’s passed down from generation to generation, the food depends on a lot of things such as the techniques used, the ingredients, the texture and even the environment. For example, I know for a fact that the masalas my mother makes are the same as my grandmother’s because we have the recipes hand-written by her. However, external factors such as the quality of ingredients or the use of electric grinders instead of the old stone ones cannot be controlled,” explains Dhondy. She goes on to point out how the popular traditional Parsi Dhansak also has different iterations across the country. “The Dhansak we make at home is slightly thicker than how many people I know make it in Mumbai. We blend the ingredients in a certain way to get a certain texture. People in the north like having it with mutton while people in Bombay tend to prefer chicken–and these things have an impact on the final taste,” she says.

Meanwhile, Sabita Radhakrishna, in her book Paachakam:Heritage Cuisine of Kerala has built a narrative around Kerala food through stories and recipes by researching the history of the various local communities and speaking to them for the recipes of some of their traditional dishes. However, Radhakrishna’s book is also testament to the diversity of the region and therefore the broad dimension of Kerala’s cuisine.

“The diversity of cuisines in the state was a challenge to record. For example, the Syrian Christians eat a lot of non-vegetarian food, while the Nabuthiris mainly eat vegetarian food and their cooking is extremely simple,” she explains. For the book, she also spoke to 83-year-old Dr. Sare Paul, who learnt how to cook from her mother, and what they ate came from the land around their childhood home, before being cooked on firewood with spices ground by hand. “Dr. Paul also recounted a story to me about how her cousin packing the Puttu too tightly in the Puttu-maker sent it shooting up like a fountain on the stove. Stories like these are nice as they teach by trial and error,” laughs Radhakrishna.

On the other hand, Khan explains how the food she ate while growing up was a mix of her family’s ties with the Nizams of Hyderabad and her mother’s Bihari-Bengali heritage. “My father did not like fish and ate roti every day, while my mother loved fish and had rice daily. What I ate at home was authentic to me and that is all the authenticity that matters to me,” shares Khan. As for Sen, she recounts how her family would use a dash of juice from onion, garlic and ginger while making mustard fish. “A lot of Bengalis will be gobsmacked to hear that we added this to mustard fish!” she laughs.

For Sen, the authenticity of a recipe lies in its basic foundation, after which you leave room for customisation. Dhondy points out how she tells everyone to follow the recipe perfectly for the first time and then to tweak it later to suit their palates. Meanwhile, Khan sums up, saying: “Heritage food for me is what my Ammu, my mother; Haaji saab, my family cook; and Maa, my ayah would make. What is really important is respecting the stories of the people whose food you are making. I am less interested in authenticity and more interested in justice and fairness. A separation of people and their food or heritage and their stories should not be made.”

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