Stories of culinary heritage are seeped in memory and family lore

By Anannya Sarkar
22 August, 2022

Stories of culinary heritage are seeped in memory and family lore

By Anannya Sarkar
22 August, 2022

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.

Anahita Dhondy's cookbook recapitulates some of her memories of growing up tasting her mother's cooking

While the foundation of a traditional Parsi dish such as the Akhuri remains the same, the iterations may vary, depending on the region

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