This cookbook featuring heirloom recipes shows how crowdfunding and self-publishing aren’t always daunting

Buoyed by overwhelming support from a community of culinary and culture enthusiasts, A Kitchen of One’s Own brings together over 40 recipes from across India

Founded by Anisha Rachel Oommen and Aysha Tanya, the online publication Goya Journal was born out of the need to document food from across India in all its diversity and socio-political hues. Essentially focussed on storytelling, Goya Journal has assimilated an organic community of followers since its inception over six years ago. Their experiences of gathering these stories has now culminated into a cookbook titled A Kitchen of One’s Own. While being a community-driven cookbook featuring over 40 heirloom recipes from across India with illustrations by Zainab Tambawalla and the book design by Nivaala are interesting facets, the fact that it is crowdfunded and self-published further enunciates the spirit of community that backs the book. In a chat with The Established, Oommen breaks down the how-tos of curating a community-driven, crowdfunded and self-published cookbook.

What led you to put together A Kitchen of One’s Own and how did you set out making it?

This book has been six years in the making and that’s how old Goya Journal is. Right from our very first year online, our community and our readers had been saying that they love the way we tell our stories, our visual identity and how they would love to have a physical copy of our form of storytelling to keep at home. In a way, this is a sort of a manifestation of what they have asked of us over the years. Earlier this year, Shruti [Taneja] of Nivaala reached out with the idea of putting together a cookbook. We had worked with them earlier on a digital cookbook to raise funds during the second wave of COVID-19, when we worked with eight Indian chefs, raising around ₹ 13 lakh. We loved her work ethic as well as her work as a designer. So she said she would design the book and have a recipe-journal section, following which we picked 40 of our best recipes contributed by our readers that represent the length and breadth of the country. To the larger public and the media, Indian cuisine is usually limited to Punjabi or Mughlai or two-three other dominant cuisines. We wanted to take that further and deeper and the diversity of the recipes in the book represent that.

Why did you choose the self-publishing route? What were some of its difficulties?

Self-publishing is hard but to be honest, working with a publisher can be equally hard. Aligning your aesthetics and your vision for the book with a publishing house that is able to trust you enough and put a budget on that is a big ask. I was talking to my partner Aysha about this and she suggested that we could crowdfund it because our community has been asking us for this, so why not trust that our community will see us through and back us on that project. And really, the community did come through for us.

Talking about the struggles of self-publishing, we had to figure out a few things that we did not know earlier. We had to find a printer we could trust and Nivaala took care of that as they had printed multiple recipe journals before. Shruti knew the kind of paper we wanted and the look and feel of it. We had been collecting these recipes for six years so we just had to go back and see which ones resonated with the theme of the book–recipes for the modern Indian cook. We wanted something that people could use even if they were cooking for one person but also be able to churn out something extravagant, like our Sindhi biryani or something homely like the Lokri from Assam which uses leftover milk solids from when you cook ghee, in which you stir-fry vegetables–an unusual recipe that was being documented for the first time outside of oral tradition. While shortlisting the recipes was hard, it was also a wonderful task as we got to go through our archive of recipes. We were initially a little anxious about the crowdfunding but it surpassed our expectations, way beyond what we could hope for. We were so touched and humbled by how the community responded.

How challenging was it to crowdfund the cost of publishing the cookbook?

We worked on the costing with Shruti and what it would take to have Zainab Tambawalla illustrate a few recipes along with the cover design, and then to print a certain number of copies. We came up with a figure of ₹8 lakh that would just about cover our costs. And as you can see on our crowdfund campaign, while we crossed ₹ 10 lakh on the campaign, we received orders way beyond it. We had orders for about ₹ 11 lakh and we printed around 50 extra copies that would then be for sale after we shipped out the pre-orders. So self-publishing really seemed like the best route for us.We worked with the crowdfunding initiative CrowdHive (www.crowdhive.in), founded by Raveena Banze and worked with her and her partner Irfan Bashir. They have co-authored a book on crowd-funding and had some experience of doing it before. We met them and were one of their first few pilot projects so they were happy to run it for us pro bono and hand-hold us through it. It was an incredible experience and they were very responsive with changes and personalisations we requested. Both Raveena and Irfan have a strong grasp over the inner workings of crowdfunding, the marketing around it and the communication with the audience.

Considering the work that Goya Journal anyway does, how different was it to make this book?

Goya Journal is a food and culture publication that is primarily digital;  it was completely different to work on the book. Aysha and I have worked in print before and she has authored a cookbook for her family called The Family Table as well. So we did have some understanding of how difficult it would be. One challenge was that unlike a single-author cookbook, where all measurements are standardised–say, we would use cup or weight measures for all ingredients; here, the ingredients varied from cups to tablespoons to weight measures to sometimes even a handful of ingredients because each recipe was from a different author or community or region, representing various ingredients and techniques. I was initially worried about that but my partner pointed out how this was also representative of the cuisines in India. Having these variations is representative of the community and the voices of the people, so we leaned into that without taking away the authors’ voice or the authenticity.

What were some of the struggles and victories of the process?

The struggles would definitely be coordinating with over 40 authors, proofreading and to figure out what the book would look like. One of the really beautiful aspects of working with Zainab was to see how she brought the recipes to life. She worked in a way that blew my mind–she would pick a recipe from a particular community and then research the tables, homes and the visuals that would be representative of them. Seeing the contributions from people we know and don’t know was also really moving. While Ayesha would be happy looking at how people who did not know us came forward to help, I would get teary-eyed looking at those who knew us from when we started, coming forward to help.

What has been your biggest learning  from this experience?

The biggest learning has been to trust our community. Aysha has had great faith in our community while I had been a little apprehensive. I had always known that Goya has tremendous goodwill in the market with our audience and community but this is the first time we tested it and they really came through for us. This has been a huge marker for us, as a business.

Additionally, Goya has always done things via collaborations. We have worked in the spaces of design, art and with home-cooks–spaces that are not quite our forte but the results have been far greater than anything that we could have achieved by ourselves. The cookbook has also been an outcome of collaborative projects, a validation that it’s definitely the way ahead. To have a physical book as a small media house in the Indian food-publishing landscape is a huge achievement. We are so proud of ourselves, our community and our writers for putting this together. Now we are waiting for people to receive the book, cook from it, send us pictures, tag us on social media and have a few events over the next couple of months. We are hoping to meet people and celebrate this landmark together.

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