A repository of recipes

Handwritten recipes and memories around them are always special. Thanks to an online culinary project, such treasures are being archived as a community cookbook, writes Sharmila Vaidyanathan

Juliana Colaco’s recipe for a simple cake does justice to its name. With just a few ingredients, this cake seems to be a beginner’s baking dream. But it is not
the simplicity of the recipe that stays with you long after you peruse it. It is Colaco’s handwriting that takes over her diary entries between the 29th of
January to the 3rd of February 1968, and a mystery ingredient following the mention of 1/2 kg sugar. It is nuances like these that make handwritten recipes and memories around them special, and thanks to an online culinary project, such treasures are being archived in the digital world for posterity.

Meet the Indian Community Cookbook Project (ICCP), a brainchild of three students from the FLAME University, Pune. For Ananya Pujary, Khushi Gupta, and Muskaan Pal this journey began as a small project for their Introduction to Digital Humanities course. Two years since its inception, the website is slowly turning into a treasure trove of community cookbooks, exciting regional recipes, and an interesting analysis of India’s culinary history.

“The project was initially meant to document the recipes of my community which is the Tuluva community from Karnataka,” says Ananya. “A lot of our recipes have not been documented in the written format, and we thought that we could create an online repository for them,” she adds. As the team began researching into this concept, they realised that this was a common phenomenon across several communities in the Indian subcontinent. “This is how we expanded the project to include other states as well,” the team explains.

The website is divided into three sections, and the project documents recipes and cookbooks in the archive section. Currently, there are about 15 collections here, which the team has sourced through their immediate circles. Juliana Colaco’s Simple Cake is part of her collection of Konkani recipes which also includes the recipe for Nankhatai. Similarly, Mangalorean recipes from SM Joshua’s book includes a meticulous spice blend and a mango pickle among other dishes. Zahra Azad’s Indo-Pakistani recipe book gives you the instructions to whip up Gulgulays or sweetened flour balls, “a tea time snack for entertaining and for pacifying children and adults with a sweet tooth,” elaborates a note after the instructions.

The team has now come up with a Google form to crowdsource recipes and cookbooks, hoping to reach out to more and more people. “We don’t really have criteria when it comes to which cookbooks or recipes we want to include. We want to be as flexible as possible,” they share. But what they are looking for is a deeper understanding of what these dishes mean for the representative communities and the memories that revolve around them. “Most importantly, the nuances that make these recipes more than a set of instructions,” they add. “You see it in our archives. Some are results of oral instructions, and some have a lax approach to measurements and ingredients.” All these idiosyncrasies are part of this world.

One of the most interesting sections of the website is ‘The Timeline’ section where Ananya, Khushi and Muskaan explore the region-wise evolution of cookbooks. For example, the team traces Goan cuisine to 1899 when The Goan Cosmopolitan Cookery Book (Part 1) was published, one of the earliest written accounts from the region. As you walk down the memory lane, you also come across some interesting entries like 100 Easy To Make Goan Dishes by Jennifer Fernandes, which was published in 1979 and includes recipes of chutneys and Goan sweets. Cut to 1993 Elsie Antoinette Maciel published the Goan Cookery Book: With Enlarged Vegetarian Section followed by A Taste of Goa by Beryl Vieira-Coutinho in 1999, which documents over 150 traditional recipes from the land. Along the way, the trio also looks into historical influences on the cuisine and patterns of ingredient usage and cooking instructions. ‘The Timeline’ section is truly a food history buff’s dream come true.

At the other end of this spectrum is the third section, the ‘Modern Cookbook Story,’ where the team is mapping Indian cookbooks published after the 1990s. “We map them according to the location which best describes the dishes in the cookbook. We hope to gain some geographical awareness from this exercise and understand if communities have been under or overrepresented, or which areas don’t seem to be getting included a lot in cookbooks,” the trio share. They also hope to channel these observations into their sourcing to fill in the blanks.

It was a different world when the Indian Community Cookbook Project came into being in April 2019. Today, as the girls sit in their respective homes combing through emails and requests, they say it is bittersweet to see how far their project has come. “We did not expect the project to come this far in this time. In the last few months, many people have reached out to us wanting to share recipes. It is very encouraging to see that kind of response,” they share.

The fledgling project is also seeing the impacts of the pandemic in other aspects. Across social media, people have been documenting their lockdown culinary derring-dos and sharing interesting trivia about family recipes.

On the Indian Community Cookbook Project as well, excerpts from Nargis Mithani’s cookbook focusing on Khoja cuisine is shared. This book was developed and published by the author during the lockdown of 2020.

As they continue to work on the project, the team hopes to create a cosy corner on the internet where recipes and culinary secrets from across generations, communities and geographies find a place.

The team believes that the project is more befitting of the times we live in where an individual can take on the agency of what they make and share it with the rest of the world in a more personalised manner.

Thanks to the Indian Community Cookbook Project, diary entries from 1968 with mystery ingredients are now also a part of these exchanges.