Recipe Keepers

Cookbooks in India and elsewhere have always been something of an answer to the culinary anxieties produced by sweeping, destabilizing social changes

- Deepa S. Reddy

I was in my late teens and my parents had just immigrated to Toronto when I began to ask my mother for recipes. Amma would return from work much later than I, and I needed methods to stave off the desperate hunger of after-school, pre-dinner hours. This was in the mid-1990s. Email was still just a college campus communication tool; nobody really could have predicted the large role the internet would come to play in culinary knowledge-transmission. Amma wrote out in elaborate detail preparation methods for arachuvitta sambar (sambar with freshly ground spices), poricha kuzhambu (a lentil-coconut mixed vegetable preparation) and the like—but these were dishes that made no sense for my urgent after-school needs. I learned instead to make chhola masala from the instructions on spice packets I would find in the shops on Gerard Street, and hung about the kitchens of friends' mothers, picking up other ideas—including a corn butta in coconut milk recipe from one Ismaili aunty in our tenement.

Over the years, especially on my return to India in the 2000s, my queries to my mother became less basic. I wanted to know now about pickling mahali kizhangu, or the uses of native greens and other local vegetables whose rare virtues Amma would periodically extol. But now her standard answer was: "YouTube-la paaru. Check on YouTube; it has everything." (In the distance, my father would grumble: "She will look on YouTube even for an uppma recipe...")