Why This Family Recipe Book?
Hello friends,
I am Prateek, I live in Paris and grew up in a multi kitchen household in Delhi. There was my grandmom’s kitchen and my mom’s. As a kid, I spent a lot of time watching them cook or getting excited about what was cooking. It is not uncommon in my family, for someone at the breakfast table to ask, what is being cooked for lunch? with always the response ‘pehle yeh to khalo’ (first finish this meal atleast).
Then of course, there were multiple other influences, one of my aunt’s in Amritsar is a family legend. As kids we used to visit my cousins in Amritsar at least once every year and by far everything that she cooked was magical! She always claims the magic is in the water of Amristsar and the fresh vegetables that come from the fields around the city. My dad’s sister, at some point used to offer cooking classes at home and we were always waiting to taste the final outcome of the lessons once all her students had left for there was always some new treat waiting. It is a family joke, though of how the cabbage rolls she made once were called garbage rolls by her brothers!
There is enough family nostalgia to dip into and since this is a family blog there will be ample dose of it. However, we thought of starting this blog for two main reasons. First, most of our second generation lives away from the mothership in Delhi and we are often calling our mom’s to check in the recipes. So the blog would be a family repository of sorts with some variations coming out of each kitchen. This means that each recipe would have a common central way of cooking but may have some variations based on how each of us cook it now.
Second, writing down the recipes is really a matter of preserving an oral tradition and transmitting it onwards. We no longer all live in the same house or visit each other as often as we used to when we were kids, hence the luxury to just learn cooking by hanging around doesnt exist anymore. In addition, we are at this point living across Delhi, Bombay, Amritsar, Sydney, Darwin, Paris and Berlin so there is going to be definitely some fusion going around in the recipes.
Even though I have only mentioned grandmoms, moms and aunts above, barring my grandfather, who is now able to make a half cup of tea himself, mostly everyone in the family cooks. My dad served us delicious breakfast with scrambled eggs and hashbrowns. My uncle is known for his dahi (yogurt) that he has been making at home for say 40 years now!
Even as we call it a family recipe book, it is open to friends because they are more often than not also family!
So welcome to the mix!
