Four years ago on Christmas, Ryna Karnik gifted her American mother-in-law a booklet of recipes belonging to the Zoroastrian tradition she hails from. Her ma-in-law would rue that what she relished in Karnik’s kitchen, she could never recreate.

Since then, Karnik’s husband, Field Nicholas Cady, who she met at the Physics major programme at Stanford, has been cajoling her to write a cookbook that acquaints Americans with Parsi cuisine.