Sudha Menon’s book ‘Recipes for Life’ is about comfort food of 30 well-known Indians
The Hindu
‘Recipes for Life’ celebrates India’s food diversity and culinary traditions
I am craving comfort food, the way my mother makes it: well-cooked kanji, payar thoran, red coconut chutney, dollops of ghee and generous helpings of crisp, hot, golden pappadam and, maybe, a dash of pickle. If you read Pune-based Sudha Menon’s new book, Recipes for Life, published by Penguin, it is bound to make you long for the food of your childhood. Comfort food is all about nostalgia and what we eat as children. As lockdowns motivated many people to return to comfort food, journalist-turned-writer Sudha Menon began her new book, Recipes for Life , on comfort food from all over India. Here, 30 celebrities from different walks of life talk about their food memories, the way their mothers would make it and how it evokes images of childhood, warmth and home. The idea evolved when Sudha lost her mother-in-law and with it her treasured recipes for different kinds of masala and dishes. “None of us, including her children, had any idea how to make those. Indians don’t have a tradition of documenting recipes. Most of us learn cooking from our mothers or elders by helping them in the kitchen. Rarely are the ingredients or methods written down. Orally transmitted by women in the household, the measures are not accurate; you depend on expertise to discern what spice has to be added or decreased. The idea of the book gained traction when my mother, Pramila Radhakrishnan, and I spent time in UK with my elder sister, Sabita, a couple of years ago,” she Sudha.More Related News