Food is our family’s love language…

… and this little corner of the internet is our heirloom recipe box gone gloriously digital, a place where memories simmer as long as the curries. Our story begins in mostly Anglo Indian kitchens, with steel tiffin boxes, overworked pressure cookers and matriarchs who measured in “handfuls” and “till it smells right”, then slowly stretches outwards as the family scattered across continents, cultures, races and religions, carrying masala stains on their suitcases.

Around our table, generations of home cooks have taken what they were given and added their own quiet twist: a grandmother who refused to write anything down, a cheeky cousin who smuggled ingredients through customs, an aunt who replaced half the traditional method with sheer improvisation and stubbornness. What started as Sunday stews, ball curry, rice dishes and Christmas sweets turned into the unofficial soundtrack of our lives, the food that appeared at parties, memorials, house moves and every “you don’t need an invitation to come over”. Recipes were rarely neat; they lived in the minds of our matriarchs, margins of old diaries, desperate whatsapp messages and, most reliably, in the muscle memory of people who cooked with more instinct than instructions.

As the years went by, our table grew louder and more colourful. New in-laws arrived with their own beloved dishes—Spanish comfort, Caribbean heat, Pakistani tang, Old-City delicacies and many more—and before long those “guest” recipes were being claimed as family treasures, fiercely defended in debates about whether “this is how we’ve always done it”. Each dish that crossed our threshold was gently adopted and cheerfully adapted: a spice swapped here, a cooking time adjusted there, until it felt like it had always belonged beside the Delacroix staples that started it all.

Leena, our eldest cousin took on the herculean task of documenting these recipes. She painstakingly put those ingredients and methods to paper. This site is our way of contributing to the legacy she started, what was once passed on only by standing shoulder to shoulder at the stove, trying to keep up while someone said “watch carefully, I won’t show you twice”. It is a living cookbook, full of exact measurements where we’ve managed them and affectionate vagueness where we have not, capturing both the precision and the beautiful chaos of how our family actually cooks. Most of all, it is a homage to the women and men who fed us into who we are, their jokes, their stubbornness, their kitchen genius preserved one pot, one pan, one stained recipe at a time.

If you cook from these pages, the hope is that you will feel a quiet tug of belonging, even if you have never set foot in our kitchens. May these recipes invite you to gather your own people, to sit and talk and argue a little and laugh a lot, until your table too begins to echo with stories, accents and aromas that refuse to stay neatly in one culture, one country or one cookbook.