Stirring Change: Reclaiming Culinary Legacies This Mother’s Day

Shore ja (move away), my mother warns, her voice rising above the hiss of hot oil. In one fluid motion, she slides a perfectly rolled luchi (or poori) into the kadai, where it sizzles and blooms like a pale flower, puffing into a perfect sphere. I watch, perplexed, as she performs this dance with practiced precision.

In several Indian homes, including mine, recipes aren't written down. They exist in muscle memory; in the hands that have kneaded countless batches of dough, molded them into luchis that rise perfectly to nourish. My mother's cooking instructions were always delightfully imprecise. She would say, "Add a small sprinkling of salt" and when kneaded about the quantity she would smile and retort, "You’ll know." These weren't inadequate directions but rather invitations to develop an intimate relationship with ingredients. 

"This is how your grandmother taught me," she would say often, recounting how she had first made macher jhol (fish curry) when she was 12 and my grandmother was sick. Those moments, fragrant with spices and wrapped in the warmth of her voice, were my first understanding that food carried more than flavour — it carried history.

Food, in the hands of our mothers, was rarely just sustenance. It was medicine when we were ill and celebration when occasions demanded. It is customary in Bengali tradition to have payesh on your birthday. And despite my aversion to sweets, I still cannot say no to the delicacy my mother makes. It tastes of home and gur in equal measure.

Yet this labour of love carries a complex history. My mother, straddling traditional expectations and professional ambitions, showed me both sides. I have often heard men reminisce about their favourite dishes prepared by aunts, mothers and grandmothers, but rarely are they told about the other side of the story; how the kitchen can be both a site of community as confinement. 

I have seen it both, the joy of creation and the price of obligation; how cooking can be an expression of love without becoming a measure of womanhood. The kitchen has always been both haven and harness. Today, I see that same space slowly transforming. The kitchen, once the dominion of women alone, is becoming more democratic, a place for storytelling and shared labour. Recipes are now recorded, modified, passed on consciously. And with that, we are reclaiming our culinary legacies, not just inheriting them.

Who knows how to express love through labour better than our mothers? How to preserve cultural identity while embracing change? How to tell our stories through what we place on the table. In a country as diverse as India, where language, religion, and customs vary dramatically across regions, food becomes a unifying thread. And mothers, in kitchens humble and grand, have been the weavers of this cultural fabric, one meal at a time.