Food that touches the soul first is said to be sumptuous. Indian food as we all know is a subtle mix of flavours and spices that lingers on our taste buds especially during the festive season. Every house a food story to tell and a food legacy to preserve for generations to come.
People / Communities have been retaining their food culture with cookbooks, recipe diaries as a traditional and robust method of preserving culture. The ICCP team has been doing it incessantly and untiringly albeit online!
Chinmayee Bhange interviews The ICCP Team of Muskaan Pal, Khushi Gupta and Ananya Pujary.Let's meet the pragmatic team behind the Indian Community Cookbook Project -
From Left to Right: Muskaan Pal, Khushi Gupta and Ananya Pujary
Hi to the team of ICCP! How did you articulate the idea of this massive project?This project began as a final project for a course we took during our undergraduate degree at FLAME University - ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities’ by Dr. Maya Dodd. Initially, Ananya wanted to document and digitize her own community’s rituals because they largely followed oral traditions and had no concrete written documentation. As the three of us began to research about food traditions in India, we realized that there is no comprehensive repository representing the sheer diversity of cuisines across the nation’s regions and communities. Hence, we decided to give it a pan-India focus. We outlined three major aspects of the project: chronologically ordered published cookbooks as grouped by region or community so that we can understand the evolution of specific cuisines over time, crowdsourced family recipes and cookbooks to accommodate various formats (audio, visual, handwritten), and a spatial mapping of cookbooks published after the 1990s liberalization of India to visualize its impact on the sharing of food cultures.
What is ICCP all about?The Indian Community Cookbook Project is an online open-access archive of Indian cookbooks, recipes, and food memories. It aims to offer a more representative glance into Indian cuisines beyond the homogenized global view of it (for instance, butter chicken and naan). Furthermore, it aims to document the evolution of Indian cuisines over time and preserve food traditions for posterity.
Documenting recipes is such a herculean task. What is your work schedule?Usually, we split the work between us of secondary research on published cookbooks and outreach to people willing to share their recipes and food memories with us. For now, since the three of us are in three different countries and timezones, we’ve been working asynchronously and in our free time on the project. We meet once a week to catch up on any progress we’ve made.
You are undergoing a course in Digital Humanities. That's something new to us. Please tell more about the course and its contents.We had taken this course as an elective in our third semester at university. The course tries to link together the world of humanities (i.e. art, music, philosophy, history, cultural studies etc.) with digital technologies. This could be using digital libraries and databases to store cultural knowledge, Google Arts and Culture is a great example of that, where digital tools can connect the humanities to a larger public (i.e. online archives). Along with our project, other examples include the 1947 Partition Archives. Moreover, the course engages with digital tools to not just preserve, but also to analyze culture (i.e. our use of ArcGIS to map cookbook-represented communities across the country). Creating an independent open-access project was the crux of this course. We were pushed to explore and engage with digital tools for causes we felt passionate about, and food was one of them!
Digitization is mammoth task in itself with all the copyright infringements. How did you go about following all the copyright norms?Definitely has been and still continues to be one of our greatest challenges. About 10% of a copyrighted text can be put up on the site, and we comply with this. If we’re able to get permission from the authors, then we put up the entire cookbook (i.e. Zahra Azad’s Recipe Book). However, usually, we are unable to get in touch with the authors or publishing houses for a lot of the older cookbooks on the site (i.e. Goan Cookery Book published in 1917). Yet, we think that instead of mitigating this issue, we chose to diversify, and include multimodal formats like interviews and unpublished, handwritten family recipes to populate our archive.
Which is the first cookbook digitized by ICCP? And how many are yet to follow?
S.M Joshua’s recipe book was a handwritten cookbook that we digitized. Though not in its entirety, it was our first entry! We’re keeping this under covers, but you can definitely anticipate more on their way!
Our country has diverse culinary stories, varied ingredients and scattered ways of doing the recipe. What made you dive into this vast pool of Community Project?It really started off as an academic project back when we three were in university in our second year. The biggest gap that stood out to us then, was that communities across India still rely on oral tradition to pass cultural knowledge down generations, especially food. Food is so ubiquitous in daily life, so I guess it is only natural. However the issue comes where in today’s world, food cultures are becoming globalized, there is increasing migration, such that the notion of a ‘community’ itself is being eroded. This also affects culinary knowledge, and since it is not documented, it risks being forgotten and lost. Another issue with smaller communities being invisible in the foodscape is that what you then call a ‘national’ cuisine is a homogenized representation of a handful of communities that did have access and resources to publish cookbooks or overtly preserve that knowledge. So then, there is a need for representation. These gaps really stood out to us which brought about the Indian Community Cookbook Project.
Can ICCP be considered as a Crowd Sourced Project? What has been your experience so far in dealing with people who have shared their cookbooks / recipes?Yes, ICCP is a crowd-sourced project, the archives section is fully crowd-sourced and the research methodology used is convenience sampling with people reaching out to us through social media. Most people who have shared their recipes and cookbooks have been very excited about sharing their community food/ family recipes. We have received a lot of love and support from people who have shared their cookbooks/recipes and most people also show their interest further by telling us more about their community food practices through a food memories interview which is a new section on our website.
Can you recollect who shared their first recipe / cookbook with you? Please share details.A neighbour of Ananya, S.M Joshua's Recipe Book was the first recipe book shared on ICCP. It is a handwritten recipe book of Mangalorean Cuisine and S.M Joshua's family shared this treasure with us.The first recipe was Mutton Curry of The Bohri Alvi Cuisine shared by Mrs. Sara Padaria from Mumbai.
How many recipes till date have you compiled and posted on ICCP page?
We have compiled 16 recipes and 8 recipe books under the Archives section of our website. Other than this we also have 3 food memories interviews and are looking to add more.
What is the time frame from contacting the recipe / cookbook owner to posting it on your website? And what all types of work in involved here? Please share in detail.The time frame takes anywhere between 7 to 15 days. The process involves either people reaching out to us or us reaching out to people through social media where they submit a google form with all the necessary details of the cookbook/ recipe that they are willing to share. Some of the important details that we need are: 1) A write-up about the community/region 2) Pictures of the cookbook/ recipe shared with photo credits 3) Give permission to ICCP to post their recipe/recipe book to the website. Once all the details are shared, team ICCP goes through them and it finally goes on the website.
As students of Digital Humanities, what skill sets did you build upon / acquire while collaborating with people of different tastes?Our course on Digital Humanities allowed us to think about cultural preservation beyond the tangible form. We were given the space to probe questions about the importance of being open source, accessibility in terms of language, visuals, and so on. By learning digital tools and techniques such as ArcGIS and Knight Lab’s Timeline, we were able to explore ways in which we could tell stories with the data we gathered and visualize it in effective ways too. Also, since the three of us came from various disciplines (Psychology, Economics, Digital Marketing, Literary and Cultural Studies), we brought different perspectives to the problems we faced and learnt to collaborate in a way that emphasized our personal strengths.
Can anyone share their recipe or cookbook with ICCP? What is the procedure?Yes, anyone can share their community or family recipes with ICCP. However, there are certain criteria that need to be followed for submissions to the archives section: 1) The recipes and cookbooks should belong to a certain community from India (fusion food and adapted foods are not included)
2) Pictures of the recipes/ cookbooks need to be shared with photo credits.
Does the donor of recipe get any recognition on your website?Yes, absolutely. Eventually, we want to see our project become a self-sufficient platform where it is maintained by the community that contributes to it, and in that sense visibility and acknowledgement are one of the most important pillars of our project.
What is the preferred language of recipes that you may work with?We try to maintain the original form in which we get our recipe and cookbook submissions. There is no preferred language, we accept submissions in all languages. Although, currently most of our submissions have been in English.
If older recipes are hand written, do you duplicate them on your website by way of digitization or you translate / transliterate them? Who does this work? And how much time is involved?
With handwritten recipes, we ask the sender to scan and share the pages because we follow a primarily online methodology for data collection. If the recipes are in a different language, we prefer to transliterate them so as to not lose any of their meanings in translation. Since the three of us aren’t well-versed in many Indian languages, we request the sender to provide a transliteration as well. The time spent on each submission depends on the number of recipes sent and the complexity of the recipe.
What is your favourite recipe so far?Muskaan - I’d have to say it's the Dhekia Xaak (Assamese) and Axone Pork (Nagaland), just because I'm so fascinated by ingredients like fiddlehead fern in Dhekia Xaak are so new to me, and it is such an easy recipe to make. Axone pork, too, uses fermented soybean, something I’ve only ever tried in Korean food, but to find it as a pivotal ingredient in Nagaland cuisine is so fascinating.
Khushi- My favourite is Puttu with Kadala Curry from Kerala. This recipe has been my absolute favourite since childhood. During my childhood, I used to have Puttu with Sugar, but after being introduced to Kadala Curry there is no looking back. It is a go-to breakfast dish in Kerala and also abounds with an impressive nutrient profile and is very healthy as well.
Ananya - From our website, I enjoy the Ragi Manni recipe from my community (Mangalorean). It was submitted by my mother and is prepared on special occasions. It’s made using ingredients that are locally available in my region, such as ragi (finger millet), jaggery, and coconut milk, so its taste reminds me of home.
One of your goals is to feature under-represented Indian cuisines. Tell us about some of the recipes that you have collected in this category, and how you found them.
So far, we’ve collected recipes from relatively lesser-known communities such as the Khoja community. We’ve either come across them on social media or were fortunate enough to receive voluntary submissions from people belonging to these communities. However, our method of collecting recipes online has limited our access to underrepresented communities and their cuisines. We hope to eventually conduct on-field work to broaden and diversify our current collection.
A cook book / recipe reveals so much about the culture and the prevailing circumstances. Can you share examples of cookbooks that made you travel back in time?In our Bengali cuisine timeline, we tried to delineate the growth of the cuisine over time and it is so fascinating how food changes over time. For example, cabbage wasn’t even part of Bengali cuisine before the early 1880s, or how in the early 1900s, you’d have more hybrid recipes like muffins made with potatoes and local ingredients like ‘patol’ (in Paricharika). The earliest Bengali cookbooks like the Parkrajeshwar (1831) feature a dominant Mughal and Farsi influence but around 70 years later, the early 1900s marked European and Anglo-Indian influences with cookbooks like the Pak-Pranali, and Bangla Ranna. It really is an interesting way to see how food reflects the socioeconomic, political and cultural shifts in society over time.
Considering you have digitized more than a thousand cookbooks, what is your take on the shift in food tastes, ingredients and their availability?From our secondary research and the submissions we’ve received of personal family recipes, we’ve come to realize that though cooking technologies and local ingredients have changed over time, people’s connection to their community’s cuisine have barely changed. We’ve observed that those who are part of the diaspora engage more proactively in preserving and sharing their community recipes. Moreover, the availability of ingredients may have changed especially for diaspora and migrants who have to acclimatise to new surroundings. However, based on our experiences so far, access to resources needed for community cooking hasn’t been much of an issue. For example, in one of our interviews with Mr. Nilav Pyne, who currently resides in Delhi is able to find all he needs to recreate his mother’s Assamese and Bengali delicacies.
Food should be global or local? Any wise comments?That is an interesting question, and the answer really depends on the interpretation. There are so many pros and cons to globalizing food cultures. As a shared cultural artifact, it brings people together, especially communities that have dispersed. For example, in our interview with Mrs. Nargis Mithani noted that people from the Khoja community are in all pockets of the world, but they all cook the same egg-based dishes on Navroz. So in that sense, the traveling of food and local culinary knowledge is so essential to that sense of identity, so naturally, even if you’re far from home, but you can access the same ingredients and more-or-less cook the same food, then it keeps the sense of belonging strong. Globalizing food doesn’t necessarily strike us as negative, until it happens at the cost of the local. We think the issue stems from the fact that in the absence of a salient community, it is easy to erode the local in favor of the global. Culinary heritage doesn’t have to necessarily be practiced, but it should be known, there must be platforms that keep that knowledge alive.
Has technology made an impact on the culinary sciences as well? How did you integrate technology and food?We’ve observed that technology has played a big role in the evolution of Indian cuisines over time. The microwave, for instance, ushered in a whole new era of instant cooking. Julie Sahni’s Moghul Microwave (1990) further exemplifies how this technology has now become an essential part of Indian households, especially among the diaspora. In terms of using technology, we use open-source digital tools to help us make inferences about culinary India, for example, we’ve tried to use Knight Lab’s timeline software to track changes in cuisine over the years in particular regions and communities.
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