A look at the chefs, home cooks and culinary traditions preserving India’s regional food heritage, one recipe at a time.
New Delhi:
A recipe can carry the memory of a place long after the people who cooked it are gone. It can preserve the taste of a childhood home, the ingredients grown in a particular landscape and the techniques passed down through generations without ever being written in a cookbook. Across India, where food traditions change from one region and community to another, chefs are increasingly looking beyond restaurant menus to rediscover these culinary stories.
International Chefs Daywas observed on October 20, celebrating the culinary profession and highlighting the importance of shar- ing knowledge with future generations. Established in 2004 by chef Dr Bill Gallagher, the occasion offers an opportunity to look beyond the glamour of professional kitchens and recognise a less visible responsibility: preserving the food traditions that help define India’s cultural identity. For a country whose culinary landscape extends from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from the Konkan coast to the Northeast, that responsibility is considerable.
Indian cuisine is not a single, uniform tradition. It is a collection of regional and community food cultures shaped by geography, climate, agriculture, migration, trade and family practices. Preserving it requires more than reproducing familiar dishes. It involves understanding where recipes came from, why particular ingredients were used and how cooking methods developed over time.
Beyond the familiar indian menu
For many diners, Indian food is represented by a familiar selection of biryani, butter chicken, paneer dishes, naan and dosas. These remain important parts of the country’s food culture, but they represent only a fraction of its culinary diversity. Regional cuisines contain dishes that are closely tied to local ingredients, seasonal availability and community traditions. The food of Kashmir, for instance, has distinct culinary traditions within Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit households. Rampuri cuisine carries the legacy of the former princely state’s kitchens, while the food of India’s northeastern states reflects different local ingredients and cooking practices.
Coastal communities have developed food traditions around fish, coconut and other locally available produce, while mountain communities have adapted their cooking to different climates and agricultural conditions. Even familiar dishes can reveal regional differences. Recipes for meat preparations, breads, rice dishes and sweets may vary substantially between neighbouring communities.
Their identities are often preserved through details that a standard restaurant menu cannot explain: the cut of meat selected, the spice blend prepared at home, the order in which ingredients are cooked or the consistency a dish must achieve.
This diversity raises an important question for modern Indian dining: how can these culinary traditions remain visible when restaurant menus often favour dishes that customers already recognise?
For some chefs, the answer begins with research. Rather than treating a traditional recipe as a starting point for experimentation, they first seek to understand its origins, ingredients and original method of preparation.
Rediscovering recipes that risk being overlooked
Chef and food historian Osama Jalali has made the documentation and revival of lesser-known Indian recipes a central part of his work. In interviews, he has discussed his interest in Rampuri, Shahjahani, Mughlai and Old Delhi food traditions, including dishes that rarely receive the attention given to more widely recognised restaurant favourites.
Jalali’s interest in culinary history developed through his exposure to home cooking and the food traditions associated with Old Delhi. He has described how recipes and techniques were shared through cooks and families, and how he began recording traditional preparations so they could be reproduced and introduced to new audiences.
His work illustrates a problem faced by anyone attempting to preserve food heritage: a recipe is not always a precise written set of instructions. Traditional cooks may rely on experience, judgement and sensory cues rather than standardised measurements. They know how an ingredient should smell when it is ready, how long a preparation should cook and how its texture changes during the process.
Recording such knowledge requires conversations with the people who hold it. It also means documenting variations instead of assuming that every household prepares a dish in exactly the same way.
Jalali’s work has included dishes such as dal gosht, kimami sevaiyan and paneer kaliya, which he has discussed as examples of traditional preparations that deserve greater visibility. Their significance lies not simply in being unfamiliar to some diners, but in the culinary histories and techniques they carry
Such efforts challenge the idea that food preservation means keeping recipes frozen in time. The first step is to ensure that the knowledge survives. Once documented, recipes can be taught, cooked and introduced to people who may never have encountered them before.
When childhood memories become a menu
The relationship between food and memory is also evident in the work of chef Vijay Kumar, who leads the kitchen at Semma, a restaurant in New York known for its regional South Indian cuisine.
The MICHELIN Guide has described Semma’s menu as a reflection of Kumar’s childhood in southern India. In an interview published by the guide, Kumar explained that his mother and grandmother were his earliest inspirations and that many dishes drew directly from his childhood memories.
The restaurant presents diners with regional dishes and ingredients that may be less familiar outside their original contexts. Its menu has included preparations such as sprouted mung beans with coconut and smoked chilli, gunpowder dosa and Dindigul biryani made with seeraga samba rice.
