From lifestyle.livemint.com
The pandemic has spurred people from all walks of life to chronicle
their family food histories, create archives of regional cuisines, and
better understand what we eat
For Bharati Sengupta, now in her late 70s, memories of leaving her
village, Puthia, in Bangladesh’s Rajshahi district for a refugee colony
in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal a few years before the 1971
Bangladesh Liberation War are still vivid. “I will never be able to
forget my childhood days. So much happiness and peace, maan-shomman (respect),” she says. Nor can she forget the fresh food from the neighbouring ponds and fields in Rajshahi.
The great Bengal famine of 1942-43 too is deeply etched in her
family’s collective memory. Cat-dida, as she is fondly called by her
grandchildren owing to her love for cats, remembers a dish her mother
taught her at the time, which has a direct connection with the famine.
She called it durbhikkhyo torkari, or sabzi of the
famine. It was made with radish stalks, roots of leafy green vegetables,
cauliflower stems, bottle gourd peel and green peas—essentially
elements that would have been discarded in normal circumstances.
Sibendu Das, 39, has been collecting culinary stories such as Sengupta’s
as part of the “Unsung Kitchens of Bengal” initiative on his Instagram
account, Pickle to Pilaf. A content consultant with a real estate firm
in Kolkata, he has been documenting the lesser-known food practices of
Bengal through the pandemic. For Das, his Instagram page has become a
repository of memories—an archive of sorts—of people of the state, from
Birbhum and Malda to Midnapore and the 24 Parganas.
Just like his account, many other archiving projects, chronicling
lesser-known Indian culinary narratives, sprang up during the pandemic.
They tell stories ranging from familial histories to sociopolitical
events and the evolution of sub-cuisines. These projects—in the form of
an Instagram page, or a series of articles or a book—create a nuanced
understanding of our diverse food habits, topped with dollops of
nostalgia. The pandemic gave people time to reflect, connect and delve
into their traditions to find not just old recipes but gain an
understanding of culture, politics, economics, even climate change.
Indranee Ghosh’s recently released Spiced, Smoked, Pickled, Preserved,
another memoir of family recipes, brings together Bengali and Khasi
cuisines, with a few elements from Nepali cooking thrown in. This
chronicle of a Bengali family living in the Khasi hills is full of
stories—some poignant and others hilarious. There are tales of
locavores, ghosts and premonitions, and stories of rare foods such as unei,
which resembles a poppy seed and is crushed and shallow-fried with
onions and green chillies. There is even a mention of “lobworms”, or
edible worms found in trenches during the 1962 India-China war.
Later this year, Hachette will be publishing Rasa: The Story Of India In 100 Dishes
by Shubhra Chatterji, enthralling stories of a hundred dishes the
author has collected over the past 10 years. The book traces the history
of India through its cuisines. The chapters include recipes and stories
of the origin and evolution of those dishes.
Recipe card for
gunpowder ‘podi’ created by Aaryama Somayaji for Podi Life, a small
home-run brand which makes heirloom south Indian blends. Photo: courtesy
Aaryama Somayaji/High on Mangoes
So what was it about the pandemic that prompted people to scour through
old trunks filled with their great grandmother’s notebooks or vintage
cookbooks to trace their culinary heritage? “2020 made us look at food
in a way like never before. Before the pandemic, people were talking
about indigenous produce but only as a niche thing. All that changed,”
says author, food chronicler and culinary consultant Rushina Munshaw
Ghildiyal. A good example of this would be the Squibsters Instagram
handle run by the Bengaluru-based food stylist and photographer
Sanskriti Bist, who documents indigenous produce from the Garhwal region
in Uttarakhand. Her social media page explains how to use these
ingredients such as mandua atta, timur, roasted perilla seeds and mustard flowers to recreate modern dishes such as ramen bowls.
Ghildiyal believes the lockdown came as an eye-opener. Produce was
not being transported across long distances, so people were forced to
eat locally and seasonally, and innovate in the kitchen. “Some of us had
the opportunity to spend a lot of time at home with older people and
explore family recipes. I am in Dehradun with my in-laws. Earlier, we
would have come for holidays for a fortnight. But staying with them
during the pandemic brought into focus the inherent wisdom passed down
through generations,” she says.
A deep dive into family histories
Several food projects came up during the lockdown, allowing people to
take a deep dive into culinary histories from around the country.
Mythopia and Kurush Dalal, a Mumbai-based archaeologist and culinary
anthropologist, held Studying Food workshops. Shubhra Chatterji curated a
#HistoryOnAPlate series on Instagram, focusing on topics such as desi
fermentation practices.
Ghildiyal started the Spice Chronicles series, mapping flavours from
across India. Anindya Basu, who helms the website Pikturenama about food
stories and photography, did Pujo reels on social media last year,
connecting with Bengalis around the world through Durga Puja cuisine.
Ragini Kashyap of Third Culture Cooks (TCC) designed and hosted the
Partition 73 series in August last year to explore the impact of the
event on various aspects of life, '[including] family memories, art,
music, history, community, and of course, food'. She conducted 60-minute
interviews with notable chefs, authors, historians and survivors of the
1947 Partition. This series was motivated by a deep personal
connection, as her family’s history was fundamentally altered by the
events of 1947.
Prior to the lockdown, as part of her Bordered dinner series, Kashyap
would host an August-1947 meal, exploring various aspects of the
Partition over a six-course meal. However, in 2020, Kashyap decided to
explore the subject from a wider perspective, including material memory
with author Aanchal Malhotra, the changing face of the cities of Lahore
and Delhi with Professor Nadhra Khan from LUMS, and the experience of
splintered families with Chef Asma Khan, among several others. All the
interviews are available on the Third Culture Cooks Facebook page and
YouTube channel.
Ragini Kashyap of Third Culture Cooks. Photo: Alisha Vasudev
Kashyap started TCC in 2016 to meaningfully explore the relationship
between food and history. This then evolved into a supper-club series,
as part of which she spent two years interviewing people and mapping out
the connections between food and geo-political conflict. Kashyap has
now taken TCC a step further this year with two new food documentation
initiatives—a podcast 'More than Masala', and an experiential virtual
journey 'To Desi, From Desh'. The former is a collaboration with
US-based Keith Sarasin, author, chef, speaker and restaurateur, hopes to
be an easy, engaging conversation about the world of spices. “We both
are coming to the topic from two very different perspectives - Keith as a
chef, and me as a food researcher. The idea is to talk about how spices
are used beyond the subcontinent, how people extract flavour from
certain spices, pull out some interesting, lesser-known stories, and
discuss why some practices have become popular in certain parts of the
world,” she says.
The second initiative, 'To Desi, From Desh' is a journey to examine
global culinary connectedness through the lens of Indian history. There
are several groups of people who both made the subcontinent their home
(To Desi), as well as those who moved away (From Desh). Every month,
Kashyap will take participants through the journey, history, music and
food of one region, ultimately making connections across global cuisines
and cultures. Participants will receive exclusive podcasts, virtual
interviews, recipes, music, and intimate chat sessions.
Over the course of her research, Kashyap has found fascinating
insights about ingredients, nomenclature, human ingenuity and
adaptation. For example, the bara, a variant of vada shows up across geographies as diverse as the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. While some baras
are soft and pillowy, others are crunchy snacks. The fact that the same
name is used is a testament to how strongly people worked to recreate
foods from their homeland, while integrating new influences.
Projects such as these have nudged people to look inwards, explore
family traditions and practices. “Even the kind of response we got to
Indian Food Observance Days in 2020 was phenomenal, way more than any of
the previous years. That just shows how keen people were in learning
food history,” says Ghildiyal.
Sibendu Das of Unsung Kitchens of Bengal was glued to these food
history workshops during the lockdown. “My parents stay in Chandannagar
but I have an apartment in Kolkata due to my job. I was stuck there when
the lockdown happened,” he says. As he started cooking for himself, Das
realised how little he knew about Bengali cuisine. “Mochar ghonto, dhokar dalna—I
have always eaten these but never thought what it takes to make them,”
he says. While attending #HistoryOnAPlate lives and Dalal’s workshops,
he began to realise the importance of documenting and archiving one’s
own food history, understanding that culture, food, politics and gender
are not mutually exclusive topics.
When he started asking his mother, grandmother and aunts—Sylheti
Bengalis who had spent time in Tinsukia, Assam—about their unique food
memories, Das realised they too had forgotten a lot from their
childhoods. “The one meal that I have grown up hearing about is the annaprashan (baby’s first meal of grains) of my chhoto
mama (younger uncle), which happened some 40 years ago. But no one
remembers the menu any more, just the taste and how delicious it was,”
says Das. That’s when he decided to start an Instagram page dedicated to
Bengal’s food.
The journey since that day, 5 June, has proved to be a deeply
educational one. For instance, when he posted about one particular saag,
a woman from Srinagar noted that her family used to make something
similar. Such culinary connections have changed the way he looks at
food.
For one, cuisine is no longer apolitical. On Instagram, Das has dwelt
on the impact the Bengal partition had on food, even the “food-shaming”
of East Bengalis for their love of dried fish, or shidol.
“When I started the page, I took it for granted that Bengalis already
knew about such dishes. But as I started posting, Bengalis began to
message that they didn’t know about some of the dishes, such as dhuki from Birbhum, a steamed rice cake which was made by one Muslim Bengali family,” he says.
Sibendu Das has
chronicled the life and times of Bharati Sengupta, now in her late 70s,
who makes the 'durbhikkhyo torkari', or sabzi of the famine. Photo:
Sibendu Das
These days, one can find Das picking his 85-year-old grandmother’s
brains for food wisdom and knowledge. For one of the #HistoryOnAPlate
lives with Chatterji, he recreated one of his grandmother’s recipes for kancha tok,
a drink that was popular in Sylhet but is rarely made in homes any
more. “This was the first of her recipes that I documented with proper
notes. It is made with poppy seeds, coconut, gondhoraj lemon leaves,
tamarind and jaggery,” he says.
Like Das, Rutuja Deshmukh, 38, too has spent the pandemic delving
deep into her family history. She has been going through her great
grandmother’s handwritten notebooks, which offer a glimpse of
resplendent Thanjavur-Maratha cuisine. The first record of this cuisine
dates back to the 1600s, when the state of Thanjavur enlisted the help
of the Marathas to repel an attack by the king of Madurai. “These
notebooks had been lying in my brother’s home for quite some time. A few
years ago, while rummaging through my mother’s things, I came across
these. My mother had been referring to them forever. But since she is no
more, there was no way to ask about the contents within,” says
Deshmukh, a professor of film studies and a doctoral candidate in Pune.
One of the notebooks was in such a tattered shape that her mother
rewrote the recipes. “I have those as well as the original ones,” she
adds.
The recipes are quite elaborate, and very different from Deshmukh’s
style of home cooking, which is more about simple everyday cooking and
quick-fixes. They first came in handy a couple of years ago, when some
friends were visiting and she wanted to make something different from
the usual Awadhi or Hyderabadi dish. She started going through the
notebooks, only to realise it wouldn’t be easy to recreate some of the
dishes since the measures were in ser and rattan.
Deshmukh first worked out the equivalents in modern measures like grams.
And the dish turned out so well that she started cooking from the
recipes more often. People would compliment her on the food and tell her
it reminded them of her mother’s cooking.
“Thanjavur-Maratha style isn’t a pan-Marathi cuisine, hence not everyone
knows about it. It was only during the lockdown that I managed to go
through all the notebooks in detail. At that time, I had also started
authoring a chapter on food, relationships and covid-19 for a
Paris-based publication,” says Deshmukh. The notebooks didn’t just
provide interesting recipes such as rabbit curry but also offered an
insight into the personality of Shanta Devi—her Ajjima (great
grandmother)—who came to Kolhapur as a newly-wed from Thanjavur and
brought with her the nuances of this unique cuisine. “I was really
impressed with her lively sense of humour, which is a departure from the
Pune-Marathi style of caustic sarcasm,” says Deshmukh.
She says the notebooks are also a treasure trove of remedial and
medicinal recipes. This is representative of the fact that at the time
kitchens also functioned as apothecaries. “There is a very interesting
concoction for lactating mothers. Your breasts end up getting sore, dry
and dark. She has written a recipe for paan, which you first
chew and then rub on yourself. There is also a recipe to reduce
postpartum flab. I wish I had read these when I was a young mother,”
smiles Deshmukh.
The case of the missing veggies
Akash Muralidharan
designed ‘Missing’ posters for traditional vegetables that are no longer
available in Chennai; Photo: courtesy Akash Muralidharan
For food designer Akash Muralidharan,
the quest to document the stories of Tamil Nadu’s forgotten vegetables
started in January 2020, when he returned from Milan, Italy, to Chennai
with a master’s degree in food design and innovation. Sifting through
everything that had been stored in the room during his absence, he came
across his grandmother’s copy of Samaithu Paar, a cookbook of
20th century vegetarian Tamil Brahmin cooking dating back to 1951.
Written by chef Meenakshi Ammal, this book contained over 350 recipes.
“My grandmother had carried this book to her new home after getting
married and it was a huge part of her life. As I went through the three
volumes, I could relate to the moments from the past when she would have
read the recipes and created the dishes,” says the 26-year-old, who
teaches design at an architecture college in the city. Samaithu Paar is
unique, for it is an early and rare example of a cookbook written in an
Indian language. It went on to become a staple of trousseaus. Today, it
helps outline the culinary landscape of that time.
While going through Samaithu Paar, Muralidharan came across
several vegetables he didn’t recognise, since they don’t form part of
the kitchen pantry today. These included air potatoes, or kaai valli kodi, and mookuthi avarai,
or clove bean and sunberries. His grandmother would grow the latter in
the backyard, but he hadn’t come across these berries since the family
moved homes.
So he undertook a 100-day cooking challenge, starting 1 March , 2020.
Each day, he would cook a recipe from the book and post the results on
Instagram. Together with collaborators Priyadarshini Narayanan and
Srishti Prabhakar, Akash Muralidharan created illustrations of the
missing vegetables, sourcing information from farmers, greengrocers and
friends.
In the process, Muralidharan discovered some of the vegetables are
still grown in some regions of Tamil Nadu. He learnt about air potatoes
from a friend whose grandmother was growing them in Thiruvannamalai. And
he came across clove beans in the hinterland of Tamil Nadu.
“The best part about Samaithu Paar is that it doesn’t read
like a cookbook or a manual, but like a story. It features interactions
between persons and ingredients. The book doesn’t dictate instructions
but has a beautiful narrative,” says Muralidharan. Certain things
brought a smile to his face. For instance, the measurement for tamarind
in sambar has been calculated as the equivalent of the size of a lemon.
No wonder then that there has never been any other way of measuring
tamarind at his home. “The book talks about the feel of cooking with
hands. In some recipes, it mentions taking a palm-full of salt. This is
not a universal measurement. But to me, it is very poetic, measuring
stuff like this as opposed to an industrialised measurement,” he says.
For Muralidharan, this project is not just about nostalgia, but about
finding connections between politics, culture, climate and food. It is
this that pushed him to investigate the missing veggies and the reasons
behind their difficult modern provenance.
The quest brought another realisation: of the kind of changes he
would like to see within him and around him. “Farming is an activity
everyone should be involved in, even in the city. Urban farming can help
combat climate change. If urban farmers in Chennai start to grow some
of the veggies like clove beans in the backyards or on the balconies, we
will have far more sustainable food habits,” he says. “I am afraid that
if we start forgetting these ingredients in the city, the farmers too
will stop growing them as there will be no profit.”
Just like Muralidharan, Aaryama Somayaji too has been interpreting
food memories through illustrations on her Instagram account, High on
Mangoes. A graduate from the National Institute of Design, Vijayawada,
she started drawing food nearly 1.5 years ago. “I was working on the
covers of a poetry collection at Harper Collins India’s art/design
department. There, I ended up looking at a lot of cookbooks and began
doodling food,” stated Somayaji in a previous interview with Lounge.
She wanted to make it a regular feature on her Instagram page and this
led to the #FoodFriday series. She takes cues from people about
cuisines, memories, lesser known produce, vintage vessels, and more, to
translate them visually.
Forging connections
These archives aren’t just a repository of revelations, they are also
helping create connections between people. For instance, Sanskriti Bist
(Instagram handle @Squibsters) had travelled from Bengaluru to Dehradun
to visit her parents when the lockdown happened. “I am from Uttarakhand
but I have never had the opportunity to stay there for so long,” says
Bist, who has just returned to Bengaluru after a year. “While there, I
tried asking my maternal grandmother about Garhwali cuisine but she
couldn’t offer much information. Due to close proximity of the region to
Uttar Pradesh, and with locals migrating to the neighbouring states,
the food we eat has taken on those hues.”
Usha Rawat (above)
helped her younger neighbour Sanskriti Bist document produce from
Uttarakhand during the lockdown. Photo: Sanskriti Bist
That’s when her neighbour stepped in. Till the lockdown, “Usha Aunty”
[Usha Rawat] and she would merely greet one another and move on. But
during the early days of the pandemic, interaction between the
neighbours increased. “She comes from Mana village (last village of
India) in Chamoli, which touches the Tibetan border. The cuisine there
carries those influences, with hand-rolled noodles called sunder kala made with turmeric, atta, salt and pisyun lun
(garlic leaves salt),” says Bist. Usha Aunty would source ingredients
and pass them on to her, and soon Bist was drying mutton fat to make
salted tea, fermenting jann, a local alcohol made with a starter called balam and jhangora
(barnyard millet), and preserving produce in true Garhwali style. “She
taught me different ways of extracting oil from apricot and drying and
preserving different parts of mutton above the chulha (stove).
Usha Aunty has amazing stories about how to catch and cook porcupine
meat, which is considered a delicacy in Uttarakhand, and more,” she
adds.
During the process of archiving, people have moved from collecting
oral histories and older material to standardising measures and
ingredients. Pune-based entrepreneur Aditi Bharadwaj started The Nanima
Project last May in her grandmother’s memory. As a part of the project,
she sent emails to friends and food enthusiasts about their favourite
food memories. She received interesting responses, ranging from a
signature cake pudding from Ayshwarya Serfoji Rajebhosle of Thanjavur,
to handwritten recipes for a lemon fool, a rich, creamy dessert, going
back to 1888, Agra, courtesy Claire Bailey.
The Nanima Project
regularly posts about vintage cookbooks such as the one by The
Zoroastrian Stree Mandal. Photo: courtesy The Nanima Project
“Through this project, I also wanted
to get people to archive their own family’s food history. Maybe your
grandmother made only bread pudding and omelette, but it’s those dishes
that you remember. Digitise, document, archive family recipes, they are a
great window to the diverse food cultures in our country,” Bharadwaj
had noted in an earlier interview with Lounge.
Now, as she gets set to make pickles drawn from her family
traditions, she has made it a point to note down the ingredients. “We
tend to take our parents and grandparents for granted, that they will be
around forever. Make sure to weigh, measure things and write them down.
My plan is to cook through all the recipes handed down by my mother and
those written in my grandmother’s notebook, and then post those on my
page,” says Bharadwaj. “It is time to delve into our unique family
histories and not follow social media trends blindly. If we did the
latter, we would all be making dalgona coffee from Kanyakumari to
Connecticut.”
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