Memories on a Plate, a crowd-sourced initiative by Nivaala and The Alipore Post, seeks to build a bigger kitchen—one with room for memory, identity, grief, and a wide spectrum of emotions that deepen our relationships with food.
An orange chutney reveals an Amuma’s (grandmother in Malayalam) swiftness in the kitchen. Half-boiled eggs become a father’s love language. At a funeral, concern arrives in the form of a meal brought by neighbours.
In Memories on a Plate, such personal remembrances surrounding food transform into a deeply immersive culinary anthology. Curated by Nivaala and The Alipore Post, the collection brings together stories from 100 Indian kitchens around the world to explore the intersection between food, memory, relationships, and nostalgia.
Through evocative personal anecdotes, poems, recipes, art, photo essays, and intimate audio memories, Shruti Taneja (founder of Nivaala), and Rohini Kejriwal (curator of The Alipore Post) share that their 225-page anthology sees recipes as “living artefacts,” carving a unique space for food memories that is both simple, yet profound. “Dishes such as churma laddoos or umbrachi amti made during festivals, the search for the perfect galouti kebab or ingredients you don’t know the name of, the warmth of stuffed parathas during winters with seasonal pickles made with love in small batches. Everything is a reminder of moments spent with loved ones or alone, feeding and being fed,” says Rohini.
Having collected a trove of memories from kitchens across India, one observation that stood out to the duo was how food often revealed itself as a form of resilience, a medium to preserve one’s identity when faced with challenges like migration, displacement, or generational shift. “Memories on a Plate consciously creates a broader, more inclusive map of the Indian food landscape. There are stories that capture the migrant experience, love-hate relationships with specific ingredients, iftar kindnesses during Ramadan, and the joy of creating new [food traditions],” shares Shruti.
Read these excerpts from four of their contributors—Sneha Suresh, Shubhshree Mathur, Oorja Makkad, and Imdad Barbhuyan—as they navigate their own relationships with food:
Tasting Grief
After we laid him to rest
We didn’t cook our meals
Breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner – and then again,
All over. But we did eat.
Neighbours packed boxes and tiffins stuffed
With morsels of normalcy, steadily trickled in –
Black tea, Eid delicacies, steamed rice and then some.
Grief tasted of all that we had and all that we had forever lost –
All at the same time.
Sneha Suresh is a freelance writer and researcher. She spends hours poring over her books and easily gets lost both in the library and on her way to it. Her PhD on Culinary Writing has led her to diversify her interests on research on food, popular culture, as well as emerging forms of narrative fiction.
Hadda
I was barely two years old but being born in a Mathur family meant getting your taste buds developed to eat non-veg food. It was a religion, if not a tradition. I think my love for food dates back to that time.
Papa, the ‘food wizard’ of our family, started feeding me delicacies which my mother frowned upon a lot. But he looked at it as preparing the tongue and gut for eating non-veg food.
Sooji, or semolina, is considered a good first solid food for babies. Papa, being the wizard he is, knew all about it. He used to prepare sooji ki kheer for me. It can be made with roasted sooji, jaggery or sugar, ghee, hot water, and some milk. This was one of the first things he cooked for me. Apart from this, there was also the upper thin layer of a roti mashed in daal ka paani with salt and turmeric powder.
Soon, he moved on to advanced food like eggs. Eggs were considered heavy for a two-year-old, my mother informs me, but not for Papa. I think it was his next step to ease me into different textures.
This is what he used to prepare for me:
• 1 Half boiled egg mashed with a bread slice
• Salt and black pepper to taste
This combination is something we still share till date. Half boiled eggs with bread is our breakfast, our love language.
After feeding me all these things over time, he finally gave me my first meatless chicken drumstick to suck and nibble on. The drumstick was boiled in water with salt and black pepper and then the meat was removed. I do not remember, but my mother recalls that it was pure ecstasy for me. From then on, whenever Papa cooked in the kitchen, I used to parade from kitchen to living room chanting “Hadda Hadda” (a derivative of haddi, or “bone” in Hindi) and only stopped when I got my piece.
I still do.
Shubhshree Mathur is a visual storyteller and design educator from Kota, Rajasthan, currently based in Bangalore. She is a tea lover, bibliophile, and as outgoing as a house plant. Her industry experience of 7 to 8 years has also seen her delve into research, branding, and writing. She hopes to write and make her own books someday.
On my Amuma’s chutney, ancestral recipes and all their magickal riddles
My go-to, oft repeated recipes that I’ve learnt from YouTube, Reels and food blogs are recipes I keep having to go back to every time I want to make that dish again. It makes me wonder if my digital world, overstimulation-addled brain does not trust itself to get it right unless that corner of the internet is revisited.
And then, there is that one special storehouse of recipes, etched deeply into a whole different attic inside my consciousness. Recipes I inherited in conversation and ancestral translation. Recipes I made the first time purely from recall and ever since, I just know, without ever having to refer to anything.
These are the recipes that were orally narrated to me—whilst I stuffed my mouth with the sumptuous dish in question—from aunts and grandmas. The recipes I heard on a landline call hurriedly written down in my pen-and-paper schoolgirl cooking notebook, in cryptic Hinglish that only I could ever decipher. The recipes experienced in imagination as they floated about in ongoing conversations, never written down at all, left to the devices of human memory and, to my surprise, totally unforgettable. When I cook these, it is like an experience of being in the body, in the womb, rather than up in the head. That meme about just standing in the kitchen and letting your ancestors whisper to you when to stop adding garam masala is my daily lived experience.
One of my favourite ancestral recipes is my Amuma’s (grandmother in Malayalam) orange chutney to accompany dosa. It’s composed of caramelised onions that give it a sweet, wholesome decadence. There is a whole lot of red chilli because she makes all her food as fiery as you’d expect from a wise Aries crone, and a touch of tamarind. Sweet, spicy, khatta (sour), what could go wrong?
There is a very specific, signature undercurrent—a theme, you can call it—to all my Amuma’s recipes that is deeply recognised and felt by all of us who have ever tried to learn to cook from her. Every recipe of hers is imbued with this energy—“How to make this dish the quickest way anything can ever be made and get the hell out of the kitchen back to your other household work?”
I’ve learnt a lot of dishes orally from my Amuma. When I make her practical, minimalist, no-nonsense recipes, I am often thinking of the contrast in our experiences of this act at the same age.
I am a woman who loves to cook, because I live in a time where cooking is no longer my role or my necessity. In my kitchen, I linger, enjoying my music. It is a pleasurable activity, something I do when I feel creatively blocked, or even as my relaxant. Something that makes a day more fun. I am a woman who can have Madras onions, sambhar cuts and grated coconut delivered ready to me—my Malayali ancestresses from mother’s side must be revelling in the luxury they see me enjoy.
More often than not, I am out here in my kitchen, cooking for pleasure’s sake, ancestral recipes that came from a line of women who cooked because they had to. I wonder if women of my generation, who love to cook, ever sense this contrast too?
Oorja Makkad is an aesthete, designer, textilephile, and kitchen witch from Bombay.
Banana Blossom
I find it so special that the mere chemistry of certain ingredients, in a certain manner, can invoke something so profound, transforming food into a medium so potent that it connects hearts across time and space. And the most beautiful thing is that this intangible wealth of a family recipe can be preserved and continued—passed down as lullabies for future generations. This comfort of a piece of home, a loved one or a moment in time within a family recipe, is a human birthright; it’s a way to combine the past, present and future over food and to carry a breath of our ancestors in our everyday lives.
Banana trees are abundant in my native land and almost all parts of the tree have become part of our local cuisine. This banana blossom recipe is our family heirloom, passed down to my grandmother from her ancestors, from her to my mother, and from my mother to me. I make this dish for myself whenever I am homesick and even before I am eating it, just the process of cleaning and preparing soothes my heart.
I wasn’t sure if I would be able to continue and pass this on, but I now share it with my friends and here I am, sharing this recipe with the world, hoping to welcome you to a part of my life. To connect with you over the love for food and be entangled in this invisible web of history and belonging that will connect us all.
New Delhi-based visual artist Imdad Barbhuyan creates atmospheric and intimate scenes by bringing out the poetry in the ordinary and mundane. Exploring themes of melancholia, memory, desire, and intimacy, he creates a dream-like world that inspires contemplation and encourages a deeper connection with the natural world.
This is an excerpt from ‘Memories on a Plate’, curated by Nivaala and The Alipore Post. Excerpted with permission from the publishers.
Find Samyuktha’s recipe for Morkozhambu here.
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