2 Friends Rescue Centuries-Old Indian Recipes in New Book

A 200-year-old recipe for Thakkadi, featuring tender meat and coconut-flecked rice dumplings, nearly disappeared from one family's kitchen until two friends decided to save it.

Food writers Anisha Rachel Oommen and Aysha Tanya spent six years collecting these culinary treasures for their project Goya, which documents home cooking traditions across India. In 2022, they published "A Kitchen of One's Own," a cookbook preserving recipes that existed only in oral tradition.

The journey began in 2016 when both women worked at a food magazine in Bengaluru. They noticed something missing from India's food coverage: the everyday cooking happening in homes, passed from grandmothers to mothers to daughters, often without ever being written down.

"A majority of food publications at the time focused on restaurants and there was very little talk of home cooking," Anisha explains. They created Goya as a digital archive where anyone could share food stories, attracting contributors from wildly different backgrounds.

The cookbook features recipes from economists, marine biologists, conservationists, and home cooks. Each dish carries a story spanning generations and geography.

Inside, readers discover Puli Fry, an Anglo-Indian meat dish that tastes better on day two. They learn to make namkeen chai from Dehradun, prepared with yak milk and mutton fat for harsh winters.

Pages reveal Assamese lokri made from milk solids, Rajasthani kanji vada stuffed with moong dal, and Kerala's fragrant meen varuthathu fish fry. One of the simplest recipes, mavin gojju, transforms raw mangoes into a sweet-sour condiment that elevates any meal.

Shruti Taneja joined the project in early 2022, bringing her own mission. After losing her mother, she realized she'd also lost all her family's recipes forever.

She founded Nivaala to create recipe journals preventing others from experiencing the same loss. Together, the trio selected 40 recipes from Goya's six-year collection.

Why This Inspires

This cookbook does more than preserve food. It captures the voices of grandmothers teaching in kitchens, the smell of spices ground by hand, and the love embedded in dishes made the same way for two centuries.

Many of these recipes appear in print for the first time. Without this effort, they might have vanished within a generation as families scatter and cooking methods modernize.

The book also functions as a journal, inviting readers to document their own family recipes alongside the collected traditions. It becomes both preservation and inspiration.

These friends turned nostalgia into action, ensuring that future generations can taste their heritage and understand where they come from, one carefully documented recipe at a time.