How Desis are preserving family recipes

I’m on the phone with my ammi-jan, my grandmother, as she walks me through how to make zarda, her famed golden sweet rice. In a moment of pause, I ask her, “Who taught you how to make this?” 

“My mother, I learned from watching her every week,” she says. My great-grandmother made this sweet rice for women in her community as they gathered for worship. 

There is a legacy in our family recipes. How are we preserving these food stories from their hands for the modern day?

We polled the Central Desi community on Instagram with two questions: “Do you keep track of your family recipes?” and “How do you preserve family recipes?”

A handful of people responded, 80% of whom said they do track recipes. Most write them down, but at least one person said they prefer to record videos. 

But that’s just part of the story. It turns out that saving recipes is not as simple as recording them. To find out more, I spoke with fellow Desis who are part of a growing effort in our communities to preserve food history — and it all starts at home. 

An oral and visual tradition

Hailing from Blackwood, Bangladeshi American Refhat Rana grew up in a household where both parents cook: his mother mainly Bengali food, and his father more diverse dishes such as pho due to his profession as a chef.

“My parents never really taught me how to cook, but I watched them often,” Rana says. He loves his mother’s stove-top chicken roast pulao and her tuna kebabs. While the tuna kebabs are easy to make, the pulao is a labor of cooking love. 

“Seeing how long it takes makes me appreciative,” Rana says, “and maybe I’ll attempt to make it myself one day.”

Rana now lives in Philadelphia, and his mother is the first contact for all cooking questions.

“One thing my family does not do is measure. It’s all eyeballing, a pinch of this or a pinch of that. Writing measurements down can enforce the idea that cooking has to be exact, which it never is.” 

Rana’s family does not track recipes. When asked how he plans to pass his family recipes to the next generation, Rana says, “I’d teach them by showing them, but I’d write things down if they asked.”

Hiba Doria, an English teacher in Jersey City and a Pakistani American, has also learned family recipes orally and through observation. 

“Cooking in my family has always been a women-bonding thing. We were shown or told how to make something, and that’s just how recipes were passed down,” Doria said. 

Reflecting on these memories, Doria notes that when her family is focused on making something with their hands, the conversation naturally flows. 

“When I cook with my mom, it’s the most I ever hear her speak about her life,” she said.

Her mom keeps an old Shan recipe book exclusively for making desserts. It’s marked up with notes.

“My nani made little notes on the recipes, too, and my mom has kept those,” Doria said. 

Similar to Rana, Doria’s family doesn’t quantify measurements when cooking. She enjoys making a beloved dish, yellow daal, every week. When a coworker asked her to share its recipe, Doria felt challenged, 

“I have no clue,” she said. “It’s hard to sit and write down exactly what I did because it changes every time.” 

Something is lost when a recipe is written, she added. When someone else makes it, it’s not the same as yours. 

“You miss the part that is your instinct,” Doria says. 

When asked how she will pass her recipes down, Doria is enthusiastic about recreating bonding time with her kids and having them hone their cooking instincts through observation.

What Rana and Doria express makes sense: Taste can never be replicated through a recipe. It’s a technique that changes based on who makes it, because each person adds their own magic touch. That’s why, no matter how exactly we may follow our mothers in the kitchen, our versions of their meals never taste like theirs.

Efforts to preserve recipes

Still, there is a growing interest in South Asian communities in recording family recipes as community connectors and personal inheritance.

Shruti Taneja, based in Delhi, founded Nivaala, a service that aims to help Desis of all generations keep track of their family recipes. 

After losing her mother, Taneja lost the chance to document some of her favorite childhood foods. 

“When my nephew was born, I realized he would never get to eat the food I did growing up,” Taneja says. To change that, she developed Nivaala to equip families with the tools to preserve their food heritage.

Nivaala offers two methods of recipe preservation: a thoughtfully designed Recipe Keeper and a newly launched app that allows you to capture audio.

“The tradition of passing recipes has been very oral. And since cooking is done by intuition, it’s easier for people to record rather than quantify,” Taneja says. “Another reason we launched the voice app is so you can listen to the recipe in the person’s voice.” That’s an important layer that keeps both person and recipe alive even after they are no longer with their loved ones.

An intriguing feature of Nivaala’s Recipe Keeper is a section that allows you to mark the recipe's generation. This was included to add depth to recipes so anyone reading them can be mindful of the recipe’s history in their family lineage. 

Nivaala is grounded in the belief that recipes are part of our identity and must be proudly captured. Their website boasts a food map starting in India, where anyone can share a recipe from their home kitchen. Additionally, they publish ingredient-specific zines that showcase diverse cooking techniques nationwide.

Closer to home, New York-based designer and graduate student Susanti Vijaykumar is creating a community cookbook with Sapna NYC. The effort came out of her work with first-generation immigrants, primarily Bangladeshi women, who were learning English. 

Food is a highlight in any community, and Vijaykumar noticed that when members of the English class brought food to each session, it sparked rich conversation. 

Every week, after an English lesson, the women are encouraged to practice writing recipes. 

“You need to learn different components to make a recipe, like how words make up a sentence,” Vijaykumar says. Just like sentences are made of various parts, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, recipes parallel these building blocks with ingredients, quantities, and steps. Drawing this connection helps the class practice their English writing skills.

Initially, the class was hesitant when broached with the idea of creating a cookbook. 

“What convinced everyone to pursue it was that it could be a way to connect with their children, and the recipes would be passed down,” Vijaykumar says.

The most challenging part of the process is writing steps and quantifying since cooking is second nature to the class. 

“We had to translate the name of different pans so that someone who doesn’t know the culture would be able to understand,” Vijaykumar recalls with a laugh.

The cookbook is a work in progress, but any group of language learners can replicate the idea. Vijaykumar hopes that projects like this can affirm the importance of ensuring that cultural heritages like recipes are passed down.

As Taneja put it, “Just like you inherit saris and jewelry, your recipes should also be inherited. They are just as precious as any heirloom.”

Ifrah Akhtar is a freelance writer for Central Desi.

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