Twist in the pot: Indian cookbooks are celebrating new kinds of mixed heritage

The map is simply all over the place, in the most delicious and puzzling ways, when it comes to food.

Croissants were likely invented in Austria, not France. Pizzas started out largely white, taking on their signature red hue only after they crossed the Atlantic to become a staple in 19th-century America (read on for why tomato emerged as the base sauce there).

Even the quintessential British fish and chips is a bit of an expat. It was introduced to England by Sephardic Jews who fled Portugal during the Spanish Inquisition and settled there in the 17th century, bringing with them their favourite pescatarian kosher and Shabbat-friendly meal.

The colonisers, of course, overhauled cuisines everywhere they went, and took elements of new food cultures back home with them. (They famously brought potatoes, chillies and pao to India, and left with new ideas for tea, sweetmeats and mince rolls).

Through history, in these ways, what we eat has been shaped by migration, wars, disease, famine, technology, trade, and simple adventurous experimentation.

Canning, for instance, allowed Italian immigrants to turn a tomato sauce into the default pizza base. (In Italy, the pizza was traditionally flavoured with just garlic, salt, basil and lard, often topped with regional produce).

Closer home, the devastating 1972 famine in Marathwada saw several members of the Mang and Mahar castes migrate to cities such as Mumbai and Pune. “They returned with ingredients such as cooking oil, which had not been available or affordable to these communities,” says Shahu Patole, a former civil servant and author of Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada (2024).

These communities had traditionally used crushed peanuts and sesame powders in place of the expensive and inaccessible oil. “Now palm, soyabean and sunflower oil became an integral part of our food; a floating layer of it on a curry became a mark of a good cook, irrespective of how it actually tasted,” Patole says, chuckling.

However it may have changed, and however alien some of the ingredients and ideas, the food of one’s home becomes a hub of cultural identity.

It is the thing that connects you with those who share the same roots, when all other vestiges of that shared heritage (language, culture, history) are forgotten, says oral historian Saaz Aggarwal, author of Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland (2012). “Most Sindhi homes still cook Sindhi food.”

Aggarwal enjoys seeing how the food itself morphs and shape-shifts, as younger generations reinterpret their heritage around the world. A diaspora Sindhi potluck may now include macaroni-patata (a pasta and potato sabzi) or paneer gado gado (an Indonesian salad of vegetables and potato, with pan-fried paneer replacing hard-boiled eggs).

In a world of increasingly mixed heritage, a slew of new cookbooks with roots in India are documenting the impact of cross-cultural ancestry on cuisine, tracking hybrid dishes, joyful experimentation, and the perspectives and longings of immigrants now up to three generations (and multiple homelands) away from their original home.

Access to these changing food narratives is just as crucial today as access to new ingredients on a different continent once was, Aggarwal says. It remains a way to connect people with new kinds of shared roots and experiences.

Our top picks, from among the newest such narratives, are Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora (WW Norton; June); Mad Love: Big Flavors Made to Share from South Asia to the West Indies (Figure 1; July); and Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi (Sydney Jewish Museum; August).

Food writer Khushbu Shah’s Amrikan explores recipes dating to early migrants, and featuring unusual substitutions. Dishes featured range from a chevvdo made with Froot Loops and Rice Chex to Shah’s recent invention of a murmura laddoo made with Rice Krispies.

In Mad Love, the Guyanese-Indian-Canadian chef Devan Rajkumar experiments with shrikhand cannolis, a palak paneer spanakopita, and a range of hot pepper sauces born of his roots in India, the Caribbean and Canada.

In Indian-Jewish Food, the writer Elana Benjamin offers recipes for a bhurji-style egg mahmoosa; a tomato shorba-style marag with chicken; and a hearty dish of onion mahashas (onions stuffed with meat and rice).

Tucked into each book are memories of family, home, inventive mothers and lost loved ones, built around the hub of food. Each cookbook also takes its cuisines forward, into tomorrow. Take a look.

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MAD LOVE by Devan Rajkumar

This is soul food of a different kind.

For the Indians taken to the Caribbean as indentured labour in the 1800s, food was more or less all they had left of home. Chef Devan Rajkumar can trace his lineage to an immigrant from this period, three generations ago.

For the next 200 years, as his family dropped roots in Guyana, they clung to their cuisine and religion, long after all else — clothes, accent, language — had changed.

The cuisine had to evolve too, he says.

Indians like his paternal great-grandfather, who likely moved from Kashmir to Guyana during colonial British rule, had to find ways to replicate his food with far fewer ingredients. “That’s why many Guyanese-Indians have dishes that are very simple yet stellar,” Rajkumar says.

There’s a comforting recipe he grew up on, for instance, that is simply pumpkin, with cumin, ginger-garlic and hot peppers, stewed in its own juices.

Most dishes adapted in similar ways, to fit the available spices: turmeric, curry powder, cumin powder, garam masala.

Then Rajkumar’s parents moved to Toronto and, at the age of nine, his ideas of Indian food opened up. The saffron kheer cooked at the temple he often visited became a dish he loved to eat and yearned to cook, says the 40-year-old.

His new cookbook, Mad Love: Big Flavors Made to Share from South Asia to the West Indies (Figure 1; July) pays homage to all these influences, with Guyanese-Indian food forming the base. “People don’t seem to know anything about Guyana and its complicated history, and I really want to change that,” he says.

The book features that country’s national dish, pepperpot (a meat-based stew), and the recipe for chunkay (from the Hindi chaunkna, to temper), which is the Guyanese-Indian equivalent of a tadka, except it’s just hot oil with thinly sliced garlic and cumin seeds. There were no curry leaves, no red chillies. But it brings a dal to life nonetheless.

There’s the smoked goat biryani recipe which he describes as “winning the lottery once you get it right”.

Cumin of age

Food, for Rajkumar, has been tied up in love, loss and grief.

When the family first moved to Canada, he remembers his elder brother, Jai Rajkumar, dragging him around Toronto, determined to try every cuisine on offer.

Then Jai died. At 21, Devan slid into a period of darkness, working in dead-end jobs, looking for a sense of purpose. By 24, he knew what he wanted to do, and it wasn’t join the family business. He moved from business school to culinary school, and finally the gloom began to lift.

“I used to be so excited just to go and make some sauces in class the next day that I couldn’t fall asleep at night,” he says, laughing.

He worked in restaurants; co-founded one in 2018; began to learn more about food through travel. He sampled traditional cuisines and new experiments in England, India, Pakistan, Turks & Caicos, Peru, Dubai. He launched a catering service; built a reputation as a celebrity chef with appearances on cooking contests and chat shows on Canadian TV; racked up 185,000 followers on Instagram, all tuning in for his Guyanese recipes with a twist.

A tribute

“For the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to speak about my brother. This book is my way of celebrating his legacy,” Rajkumar says.

Collecting recipes for Mad Love brought back memories of their first wild dashes across Toronto. There’s one for a Hakka-style chilli chicken, a Chindian or Chinese-Indian invention that he recreated after a delicious meal they had together at an eatery that was just a hole in the wall. There are the spiced, sweetened rotis that his mother Bhano Rajkumar still makes, whose fragrance always sent the two boys running to her kitchen.

About 60% of the book is new recipes drawn from his experiments over the years.

These include an “Indo-Greek” palak paneer spanakopita, a filo pastry filled with spinach and feta. “Palak paneer is spinach and cheese, and so is spanakopita, so I thought why not put the two together,” he says.

Also featured is a range of fermented hot sauces, including a cilantro pesto that provides the zing to his grilled-paneer-and-watermelon sandwich.

There’s a “vegan pepperpot”, which swaps meat for oyster mushrooms and jackfruit. This is a tribute to his mother, who made the traditional version every Christmas morning, though she was vegetarian and so couldn’t even taste it herself.

His love for his culinary heritage is reflected back to him, he says, when Guyanese followers write in to say that a dish helped them feel closer to their late parents, because it was a dish they remembered but had never learnt to make.

“This book is for all those kids who try to cook with their parents and end up having a squabble instead,” Rajkumar says. “This is to make those fleeting moments a little easier, and a little more special.”

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INDIAN-JEWISH FOOD by Elana Benjamin

Growing up, Elana Benjamin always felt like she was straddling two worlds.

“I was a minority within a minority,” she says: an Indian-Jewish Australian raised among European Jews in the beach haven of Bondi.

Benjamin, a writer, is technically a Baghdadi Jew, with roots in a community that fled Iraq in the 1700s, to settle in British-ruled Bombay.

Her parents migrated to Australia in the 1960s, and settled in the Sydney suburb of Bondi, where there was already a strong community of Ashkenazi or European Jews.

The two cultures were vastly different, Benjamin says. The Ashkenazi prayers and prayer services were unfamiliar, as were their ritual foods.

Meanwhile, her parents weren’t simply a different kind of Jew. They often broke into Hindi as well, and spent Sunday mornings buying dal and pickles at the local spice store (as well as a vivid pink rose syrup familiar across the subcontinent and nowhere else).

“Words like jeera, kothmir and ginger-garlic — uttered quickly as one word — were frequently heard in my mother’s kosher kitchen,” she says, laughing.

On Saturdays, large family gatherings at her grandmother’s house featured Iraqi-Indian dishes such as aloomakalas (fried potato), shiftas (beef koftas) and hamim (a one-pot dish of chicken and rice).

Measured in memories

When her mother, Sheila Benjamin, turned 75 last year, Elana began work on her cookbook, Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi (Sydney Jewish Museum; August).

She had made no attempt to learn the traditional Indian-Jewish dishes until then, “and I realised I could not afford to lose these recipes, which were rarely ever written down,” Benjamin says. As it turned out, some had already slipped out of her grasp.

“I started with the chakla bakla or pickled vegetables recipe, a dish my mother made often when I was a child, and found that neither she nor her sister could remember the exact quantities required,” says Benjamin, 50.

Measurements were almost impossible to come by, overall. In true subcontinental style, none of the women set much store by precision in the kitchen. As a result, it has been a case of trial and error, says Benjamin, laughing. She has had to experiment with each recipe until it tasted right.

In addition to preserving a unique cuisine, the book offers shortcuts and hacks, to allow for simpler, quicker cooking.

“The idea is to show people that hearty food can be delicious and accessible even after a hard day’s work. It does not need to feel overwhelming,” she says. “And while some dishes, such as the onion mahashas (onions stuffed with meat and rice) or meat blintzes (pancakes stuffed with beef mince), are unlikely to be weeknight meals, they’re wonderful for special occasions when the family can come together to help.”

Alongside most recipes is the history of the dish. The blintz, for instance, has roots in the Anglo-Indian pan rolls that evolved as a teatime snack during British colonial rule. It’s very time-consuming to make, says Benjamin. “I strongly recommend splitting the cooking over two days and enlisting a family member or friend to help with the frying.”

Any cuisine must evolve to stay alive, she adds. And if the dish still tastes like home, and warms the heart, you know you haven’t strayed too far.

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AMRIKAN by Khushbu Shah

When Khushbu Shah’s parents, both doctors, moved from Gujarat to Detroit in the 1970s, recipe substitutions weren’t a matter of choice or even pricing. The original ingredients — even simple ones like copra, khoya, dhaniya — just weren’t available.

Hacks were figured out through trial and error. The baking mix Bisquick, for instance, was combined with milk powder to make khoya for gulab jamun. Peanut butter replaced whole peanuts in mint chutney.

“Visit my parents’ house any day of the week and I guarantee you’ll still find a sunshine-yellow box of Bisquick,” Khushbu Shah, 34, a writer and contributing editor at the magazine Food & Wine, writes in her cookbook, Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora (WW Norton; June).

Khoya may now be freely available, but Bisquick is now the flavour of gulab jamuns here. It’s this kind of unique Indian-American tradition that Shah’s book seeks to capture.

The adaptation wasn’t all unidirectional. American foods were tweaked to suit the Indian palate, resulting in dishes such as achari paneer pizza and the mango cardamom tres leches, which feature in the book too.

Among the more creative Indian-American diaspora creations featured in Shah’s book is an upma made with Cream of Wheat (the American breakfast porridge mix), and a chevvdo that swaps poha flakes and dals for the more-readily-available Froot Loops and Rice Chex packaged cereals.

For special occasions, there is the masala chai basque cheesecake (Shah’s invention) and her jaggery and fennel Rice Krispie treats, which she calls a “super snack”.

Some recipes were born of Shah’s frustration that they didn’t already exist, such as the “glaringly obvious” saag paneer lasagna aka LaSaagNa.

Falooda, traditionally made with vermicelli and basil seeds, was missing an element of chewiness, so she created the Bobalooda, with tapioca pearls and chia seeds taking their place.

Perhaps more than anything, Shah says, the book is an invitation to be less intimidated by Indian food, and more willing to experiment with it.

Unlike Chinese, Japanese and Mexican cuisines, which have become ubiquitous in America, this cuisine is still largely underrepresented, she says. There is a sense that it is more complicated, more difficult to master. She would like to see that change.

Perhaps one factor is that America hasn’t had much of a direct history with India, in the way that the Caribbean and UK have had, Shah says.

“I do think more people do now understand how to use a vaghar or a tadka,” she adds. “But there is so much fun to be had with something like mithai-making techniques… These are the kinds of things I wish more Americans were exposed to.”