Back in 2016, a few months after Pune-based author Sudha Menon’s father passed away, she took her amma, Pramila Radhakrishnan, to her sister’s place in London. Her amma, she remembers, had “gone into deep depression, grieving the loss of her companion of 50-plus years”. A holiday, she thought, would help her cope better. “[But] as the days passed, I noticed that the only time amma was happy was when she was cooking or talking about food, something she did on our long walks when we spoke about her life back in Kerala where she grew up. I decided then that if talking about food would get her out of the grey morass, I would do that. Around the same time, my mother-in-law, a passionate cook who prepared memorable CKP [Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu] food, passed away, ravaged by dementia and with her went her legacy of the food she cooked for her family for over 65 years,” shares Menon, in an email interview.

One of her biggest regrets was that neither she, nor anyone in the family ever wrote down her mother-in-law’s recipes, because, “we just presumed she would always be around to pamper us with her food”. “I realised then that there is almost no documentation of the food that Indian families eat. Most of the recipes that have been in families have simply been passed down the generations orally, from mothers and mothers-in-law to daughters, sons, sisters, daughters-in-law. It is so important to do that because food is one of the most important aspects of our culture and identity,” she says.