Feature your business, services, products, events & news. Submit Website.
Breaking Top Featured Content:
How my grandmother taught me to cook – on WhatsApp
Novelist Rahul Raina lives in the UK. His grandmother, guardian of the family recipes, is in India. Lockdown had kept them apart, but cooking brought them together again
Kashmiri recipes are meant to be passed down through teaching, from mother to daughter in cramped kitchens, standing together over pots of sputtering oil. They are not normally held over WhatsApp conferences, shouting over frozen frames and steamed-over camera lenses, from 4,000 miles away. But that is what happened to my family. Kashmiri traditionalists to the core, refusing even to put down our recipes on paper, trusting only our memories and our taste buds, my family found itself brought together by technology.
My parents and I moved to the UK in the mid 1990s, leaving behind my grandmother, who was insistent she would not come. Britain was cold. She did not know the market traders. They might try to cheat her. So, in the early years of the 21st century, we developed a curious tradition. Every time we visited India, we would bring her a new mobile phone, laptop, tablet. She would receive them joyfully, we would sit together, figure out how the device worked, we would promise each other daily conversations, web chats, video calls. Then we would go home, two weeks would pass, and neither my grandmother nor the rest of my family would ever mention the gadget again.