Chefs Update the Menu With Old Family Recipes

Chefs are reclaiming recipes from family and community kitchens to serve diners dishes no longer made at home

- Nivedita Jayaram Pawar

There may be no better title than "indigenous food warrior" to describe Sunil Jajoria, the executive chef at Anantara Jewel Bagh Jaipur. For over a decade, Jajoria has been researching, reviving and reclaiming native Rajasthani dishes that were lost to time. It started with food stories from his grandmother, which sparked countless hours of research and numerous tours of the villages of Rajasthan. The result is a comprehensive menu of once-lost dishes, which are served at the Jaipur property.

Across the culinary landscape, chefs are turning to archived cookbooks and childhood memories to revive forgotten recipes. Interestingly, the comeback dishes don't belong to royal kitchens, but family and community kitchens. The idea is to offer a unique taste of the past elevated by modern-day cooking techniques.

The gosht aur bajre ki tehri is one such dish that Jajoria relished on summer vacations at his ancestral home in Semla-Semli village in Bharatpur district in the late 1990s. "My grandmother started at 3 pm, soaking and pounding millet before slow cooking it with marinated meat in a handi over dung cakes. Spices were kept to a minimum. By 8 pm, the melted meat and bajra created an unbelievably mellow and flavorful dish," recalls Jajoria. This dish is now rarely made at home or is done with shortcuts like pressure-cooking the bajra and meat together.

The chef also makes pithod, a dish from Alwar that features slow-cooked gram flour cakes simmered in hand-pounded masalas.