A culinary memoir is no longer a novelty. For almost a decade, Indian food-based memoirs have consistently found readers, with the likes of Aparna Jain, Saee Khoranne-Khandekar and Padma Lakshmi writing books that weave autobiographical vignettes into recipes and introduce their readers to different lives and cultures. The latest entrant to this genre is Tabinda Jalil Burney with her book Fabulous Feasts, Fables And Family: A Culinary Memoir.
The book stands out, however, in how the food is hardly the main focus of its narration. This is despite 10 of 11 of its food-focused chapters being named after a dish made by a specific person from the author’s extended family, like Naseem Khala’s Extraordinary Firni, Shahida Chachi’s Spectacular Rasawal or Abba’s Favourite Kali Gajar Ka Halwa. Each is an invitation to experience more than the dishes.
They recall a way of living, spontaneously bursting into song, poetry and funny sayings and idioms, and preparing for and participating in social and religious gatherings. The rest of its eight chapters retell fables that Jalil Burney heard from her grandmother—like Bandariya Bahuriya, The Ghost Who Lisped, or Raja Bakarkana, The Goat-Eared King—some of which may also be familiar to the reader.
In an interview with Lounge, Jalil Burney, a doctor with the National Health Service in London, talks about the heart of the book and why these otherwise ordinary-sounding dishes are special to her. Edited excerpts.
Home cooking formed a big part of the daily life of my family in the 1980s (in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh). We never ordered food just because we didn’t feel like having what was made at home. This was the case in my grandparents’ home too. We would all eat what was cooked—which was all fresh and seasonal—and things were never made to cater to a particular person’s likes and dislikes. We made sure to eat the evening meal together. This is the respect that we were taught to show to our food.
When I moved to London, I found that it became important to me that my children grow up with the food of my childhood. Since food is an important part of who I am, cooking came to me quite naturally. I learned them by watching cooking shows, reading books or calling up my mother for recipes of simple things like khichri, matar pulao or dishes I could feed my baby since I was a young mother at the time.
Through cooking, I have been able to bring up my children with an appreciation for home-cooked food. They know the love that goes into it, so they respect it. I may have moved, and my children may have grown up in Britain, but our soul is Indian—and the soul is what the spoon feeds.
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I associate each dish so strongly with the specific person who’d make it that they are the reason the dishes in the book are special to me. I start with my grandmother’s kakronda qeema because she had a bush of the kakronda in her house and she’d use the berry so well. She’s no longer there but the bush still stands in the house. Kakronda reminds me of her. My aunts, too, live on through their recipes. Every time I make these dishes, it’s like I pay tribute to them. Despite only meeting some of my aunts when they were very young, it’s as if my children know them well because they have grown up on this food and its memories.
No. I had a clear idea about what I wanted to do with my book. This was never going to be about my life or journey. I wanted to focus on my aunts because they were never specifically celebrated when they were alive. We respected them, obviously, but I wanted to honour them as my “food heroes”.
They could create a dish out of almost nothing, use seasonal produce imaginatively, and show care through food whether through a death or a birth in the family. For example, when someone passes away and the kitchen in the house isn’t running because everyone is grieving, aunts from the extended family would bring them qorma, rumali rotis, and a pot of saalan.
I remember when I was pregnant, my mother visited me with gond ke laddoo—made of edible resin, nuts and ghee. These nutritionally dense snacks are supposed to help with lactation. There was also panjeeri and hareera—another formulation of crushed nuts and seeds, mixed with milk—which is specifically made for new mothers. So this collection of my memories of these amazing women is my way of expressing my gratitude to them.
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