Shelf Life: The Stories We Keep On Our Kitchen Shelves

It always starts with the shelf. You’re hungry, you open the kitchen cupboard or the fridge, and before you know it, you’re standing there, staring at a half-empty jar of pickle, a bottle of peri peri sauce you bought in a burst of optimism, and that block of Amul butter that somehow regenerates like magic. I’ve often caught myself in that moment, realising that my shelves knew more about me than I did. They remembered the week I tried to go “healthy” (hello, forgotten chia seeds), the Sunday my nani sent me back with a jar of lehsun achar, the late-night impulse shop that introduced a fancy hot sauce no one else touches.

The more I looked, the more I understood: our shelves are messy autobiographies. They don’t just store food, they store phases, longings, compromises, and memories. They are where nostalgia and aspiration sit side by side, where Maggi packets keep company with organic pasta, and where one jar of something familiar makes a new city feel like home.

That’s what led me to this story — a curiosity about what other people’s shelves might reveal. I wanted to see if chefs, actors, and creators carried the same contradictions, the same little secrets in glass and plastic. And sure enough, they did.

Makhan Like Nani’s, Still The First Thing He Looks For

Screenwriter and actor Dhruv Sehgal, best known as the creator and lead of Little Things, still finds comfort in the simplest ritual. “Sometimes I don’t even have it, but I open the fridge expecting it will magically appear.” For him, comfort still looks like safed makhan (white butter). The kind his nani spreads on rotis in Delhi, the first thing he eats when he goes back home. That expectation, more than the butter itself, has become ritual — a reminder that some hungers are really for memory. On another shelf sits a steel katori with his father’s name engraved into it, older than him by decades. Once, when neighbours passed food between homes, utensils carried names so they found their way back. The bowl has survived long after the practice has faded, carrying with it the memory of food as community.

Around these relics are the things he has chosen for himself. Duplicate coffee presses, scales, filters in paper and cloth — a whole café squeezed into a kitchen. Heavy cast-iron pans that he collects not for show but for permanence, knowing they will outlast him and find another pair of hands to cook with. And in the photos his partner and photographer Kannagi takes, another layer of the story: a bowl of ramen, “horrible, very amateurish but special nonetheless,” and a burger made with the most processed buns and cheese, chosen to taste like childhood after too many gourmet versions. If his shelves could talk, they’d tease him for breaking things, for agonising weeks over whether to buy an ice-cream maker. But they’d also know that nothing here is random. Every jar, every pan, every clumsy experiment holds the weight of care.

Sauces From Pam And A Shoebox Castle

Actor and theatre artist Rytasha Rathore, known for Badho Bahu and Masaba Masaba, keeps her shelves stocked with the little bottles her mother, Pam, makes for her — peanut sauce, basil pesto, chilli soy, sometimes marmalade. Pam grew up in Singapore, and though she’s Gujarati, her cooking was always an experiment in cuisines. The sauces carry that history with them, the same way her pesto sandwiches once made Rathore the most popular kid at lunchtime. Even today, friends ask for Pam’s peanut sauce like it’s contraband. Alongside them sits a big tub of ghee, the ingredient she once turned her nose up at and now swears by as an “elixir,” spooned into food or rubbed on dry skin, the smell now a comfort that links her back to her dada.

The rest of her kitchen is small but full of character. Fruits sit in plastic prasad bowls from Siddhivinayak that she insists make the oranges taste sweeter. From the window, she can see a mango and chikoo tree, with squirrels and geckos darting through the branches. She calls her flat a shoebox castle, but the kitchen is its beating heart — the place where she can be free-spirited, indecisive about chips, steady with bread and butter, and grateful that she gets to live alone, wild and independent, in a home that feeds her in every sense.

Paneer For Her Son, Pickle From Her Mum

Chetna Makan, cookbook author and former Great British Bake Off semi-finalist, will tell you straight away: there is always paneer in her fridge. Not cooked, not a dish, just a block waiting to be turned into something her son will eat happily, no matter how tired he is after school. Paneer is her shortcut to comfort — his and hers. Next to it sits a jar of her mother’s mango pickle, carried across continents because the British sun never let her make her own. Between them lies the thread of two generations: a son’s favourite in London, and a mother’s recipe from India that has followed her for twenty years. When she moved to the UK with little more than a suitcase, she brought one thing that has never left her side — a wooden chakla belan (a dough board and a rolling pin), now over two decades old, still used almost every day.

Her kitchen today is bright with plants that spill into the dining space, a green frame around the room where she cooks, films, and works. The shelves hold old wooden spatulas and spoons that she refuses to replace; not everything needs to be new to be loved. And if the kitchen could speak, it would call her what she proudly is — a feeder. She cooks fresh meals for her children daily, rarely repeating the same dish, and opens her home often to friends. The kitchen doubles as an office, a family table, and a gathering place, but above all, it is where she gives food, time, and the kind of care that turns a house into a home.

Guava Jelly And Barefoot Songs In The Kitchen

Asma Khan, British restaurateur and owner of London’s Darjeeling Express, recalls a house rule from her childhood in Kolkata that still lives on in her London kitchen: “As the jelly falls below halfway, we start to eat less.” The jar is guava jelly made by Oppu from her sister’s tea garden, the kind that once turned buttered toast and Amul into a small celebration. A spoonful now and then, smaller as the glass clears, saved until the next jar arrives for her boys. Beside that sweetness sits a teak chopping board bought in Cambridge in 1992, back when she didn’t yet cook and used it to slice oven pizzas. It has taken knives, heat, and time without complaint, and stays to remind her how far a kitchen can carry a person.

Open the cupboards, and another devotion appears: tea. Rare Darjeeling, herbal blends, Japanese pots, tiny infusers shaped like teapots. Everyone drinks tea all day here. And there is always ghee, made at home. Eggs for her older son begin in ghee every morning; when the tin runs low, the night turns into a ritual. Playlist first, old Bollywood or a sweep of qawwalis or even Rod Stewart, then the slow alchemy on the stove. If her shelves could speak, they would tell you she cooks barefoot, humming, measuring by andaz rather than spoons, trusting memory more than numbers. The cookbooks can keep their scales. This kitchen listens, tastes, and sings.

Chai With Lemongrass, Jars From Pune

Sarang Sathaye, filmmaker, actor, and co-founder of Marathi digital collective BhaDiPa, starts every morning with ginger and lemongrass. The ritual is non-negotiable — an hour with chai, Shrewsbury biscuits, and conversation. It was how his mother marked the day, and now it’s how he and his partner Paula do too. The smell of lemongrass in hot water is his shorthand for home, love, and continuity.

His shelves carry the same thread of memory. Clay pots, half white and half brown, filled with homemade achar. He grew up seeing them tucked into a corner of the kitchen in Pune, tended by his aai, and he still goes back to buy more whenever one breaks. Beside them sit the quirks that tell his present story: neatly stacked packets of oregano and chilli flakes saved from takeout meals, jars of salts collected from every city he travels to. He laughs at his own contradictions — a hoarder who can’t throw away a broken spoon, yet a careful collector who builds taste and memory one jar at a time. And always, there is kokum and ghee, anchors to his Konkani roots, reminders that no matter how crowded the shelves get, they still point back to where he came from.

Panch Phoron, Hot Sauce, And Pretend Tea Parties

Priya Banerjee, actor and content creator seen in the series Mismatched and Shantit Kranti, knows the smell of Panch Phoron hitting hot oil is the quickest route back to childhood. Her mother’s comfort meal was always the same — aloo lightly fried with the spice blend, masoor daal, and luchis — the kind of dinner that appeared when everyone was hungry and her mom was tired but still wanted to feed them well. That memory lives alongside crockery she once “stole” from her great-grandmother’s home in Telinipara, pieces she barely uses now because they feel too precious. They remind her of pretend tea parties with her great-grandmother, of a childhood that still sits quietly on her shelves.

The rest of her kitchen tells the story of everywhere she has lived. Growing up in the Bay Area means her shelves now mix Indian staples with Mexican salsas, Asian condiments, American junk food, and a lineup of hot sauces that runs from habanero to Sichuan peppercorn. And then there’s the one thing that feels most personal — a jar of Nescafé Taster’s Choice, the same instant coffee her mother always drank. In a world of espresso machines and pour-overs, it’s her small act of resistance, a way of holding on to the taste of home that no one else quite understands. Her shelves, like her life, blend cultures and hold nostalgia close, finding comfort in the past while leaving room for discovery.

Chips With Her Mother, Chaos On The Shelves

Shahana Goswami, actor known for Rock On!! and Bombay Begums, almost always has a packet of chips in her pantry. The brand changes with the mood — banana chips, wafers, sometimes an ongoing Uncle Chips obsession, but the comfort is constant. Chips are her shorthand for childhood with her mother, when even a small packet felt like a luxury to be slowly savoured. She still eats them the same way, one chip at a time, stretching the packet into a ritual of salt, crunch, and memory.

Her shelves, though, are far from orderly. Dabur chyawanprash jars sit beside teas, protein powders, dates, balsamic vinegar, Gangajal, ketchup sachets, and paper cups — a collection that feels both random and revealing. It shows a woman who loves hot drinks, who believes in old-school immunity over modern supplements, who collects more than she throws away, but who always finds ways to use what she has. “A creature of strange habits and patterns,” she admits, but also one who sees a kind of logic in the clutter. In her kitchen, chips carry nostalgia, teas bring comfort, and everything else — however odd — has its place in the story.

GudRoti Memories And Ten Kinds Of Wafers

Karanvir Malhotra, actor seen in Andhera and Selection Day, usually has a packet of Puran Poli waiting in his fridge. It’s his way of holding on to the gud wali rotis he grew up eating in Delhi winters, the sweet flatbreads that closed almost every dinner. In Mumbai, that taste takes him back to the schooldays when jaggery and roti felt like their own season.

The rest of his kitchen is a mix of good habits and guilty pleasures. Almonds sit around, often ignored, while a whole lineup of potato chips — ten kinds at a time — are always within reach, best enjoyed with Coke because nothing tastes more like being fifteen again. A jar of muesli feels like the truest reflection of him: a little bit of everything, mostly good. His shelves don’t try to impress; they mirror who he is — moody, indulgent, sometimes disciplined, always unpredictable, but figuring it out along the way.