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.