On Archana Pidathala’s latest book Why Cook and its many zero-waste recipes

Archana Pidathala on her recent book Why Cook, its many zero-waste recipes, and how her kitchen has evolved over the course of the project 

I speak to Archana Pidathala about her new book Why Cook on the eve of her son’s birthday. This has her harking back to a special memory when testing out the many thoughtfully-curated recipes. “I spent an entire evening testing the recipe with him making 75 momos and chatting away! They were imperfectly sealed, but the experience of creating them from scratch and making an evening out of this was great,” says the Bengaluru-based author who has featured 16  women and their chosen recipes in her self-published, recently released book, Why Cook. 

“These are easy, comforting recipes that come from lives fully lived,” says Archana. As she describes in the foreword, the book came from her ‘11,500-kilometre tour across India to meet and cook with friends, old and new — women who have deeply influenced the way I cook, think and eat. This book is a chronicle of life stories and recipes I captured over the course of that journey.’

Archana started cooking only in her late 20s after becoming the ‘unlikely custodian of her amama’s recipes’, and her first cookbook, Five Morsels of Love (2017) — winner at the 2017 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards — was a tribute to her grandmother’s culinary repertoire. “Cooking for me became a way to approach life and it has been a great teacher,” she says. “I consciously did not want to do anything with cooking in my early years, and I often lied that I was on a sabbatical when working on my first book. What a loss that I did not cook earlier,” she says.

Read more | Archana Pidathala’s top 3 recipes from Why Cook

Apart from having 80% vegetarian recipes, there Is a strong focus on zero-waste cooking in Why Cook. Archana explains how she did not plan for the book to go in any one direction, and realised this only when she put it together. “I did not impose any restrictions on what these women would like to share or not. I just wanted their personalities mirrored in the recipes. It was very organic.”

For instance, Shalini Philip’s (of Chennai’s The Farm) memory of a neighbour in Kerala, aunty Prema, and her fried fish curry with leftover fried fish is a strongly embedded memory. “The recipe was found in her mother’s book,” shares Archana, describing the many cooking philosophies her book represents. Be it a chutney using cauliflower stems, a rasam with mango seeds, or how Shree Mirji aunty [a homemaker featured in the book] puts pumpkin skin in some batter, these are recipes rooted in their families.”

One of the first recipes Archana tested was Arundhati Nag’s batata saung (a potato curry with coconut and tamarind). “The dish is so simple, but it blew my mind.” Even Chinmayie Bhat’s (founder, Soul Slings) sweet potato payasam. “I recall going to her house and she cooked it for me. On my way home, I bought sweet potatoes and made it in an hour!”