For many chefs and food writers, watching their mothers in the kitchen and eventually cooking alongside them formed the foundations of a lifelong culinary passion. It’s the same with Ranjini Rao and Ruchira Ramanujan. Rao, a Kannadiga, born and raised in Bengaluru, who grew up having South Indian vegetarian food, influenced heavily by her mother’s Malnad roots. “We’d have the occasional North Indian meal, biscuits baked in a makeshift oven [a bed of sand on a coal stove, with a tin tray fashioned out of old Dalda dabbas, to bake the stuff in], or exotic delicacies mom cooked from her cooking club diary, with her own touch, like filter coffee pudding and custard with fruits and cream wafers. I think I spent all my childhood years watching her create magic in the kitchen,” she tells us.

Ranjini Rao