Nivaala is an organisation that believes in the power of home cooking and preserving family culinary legacies. They say everything they undertake and create is rooted in bringing people together. Homemade food is love, in its simplest form. It is a narration of our family landscape and traditions. According to Nivaala, generational recipes aren’t just dishes that we crave every so often, they contain within them stories about family and tradition as well. “And they carry on not only as things we cook, but also as lessons we learn and legacies we keep.” says founder Shruti Taneja, with whom we’re in conversation below.
From where did the idea to preserve homemade food and heirloom recipes arise?
The inception of Nivaala came about from a personal loss when I lost my mother a few years ago, and realised that I hadn’t written down or learnt any of our family recipes. It was this stark realisation that her cherished family recipes, each telling a unique story, could fade away. This inspired me to create Nivaala, a platform that encourages people to treat their family recipes as tangible heirlooms — akin to the inherited saris, watches, and jewellery that we inherit.
What’s the approach that you take to promote home-cooked food and foster a sense of community around traditional cooking methods?
Our mission, as a business, is to inspire people to record their family recipes and kitchen traditions and at the same time, allow cross pollination of recipes and cooking techniques across kitchens. India has such a rich cultural heritage, which also corresponds to a very rich culinary heritage. It’s been said that there are as many cuisines as there are languages in our country, which allows for a rich exploration of micro regional cuisines.
We’ve been putting the spotlight on this diversity through our various product verticals:
Ingredient Specific Zines. The idea behind this concept is to showcase how one single ingredient can be so versatile and cooked in multiple forms, depending on the region. We partner with brands, chefs and homecooks across the country to gather recipes, anecdotes, cooking methods, kitchen traditions, et cetera, to capture this diversity. For example, we partnered with Eat with Better for The Jackfruit Project, wherein we sent jackfruit to chefs and homecooks across different regions to capture the dishes, recipes and memories around it, and collated it into a magazine. So far, we’ve also launched The Legume Project in partnership with Tons Valley and The Mushroom Project in partnership with Shroomery
Legacy Kitchen Series is our foray into the world of condiments from micro regional cuisines in collaboration with restaurants and chefs. For our pilot, we’re launching Aam Kasundi in partnership with Jaipur Modern Kitchen and Chef Anuroopa. This is a quintessential Bengali recipe from Chef Anuroopa’s family and can not only be used as a chutney but also as a cooking paste. We’re launching this by the end of July.
Memories on a Plate. This is an upcoming anthology about stories of Indian kitchens from across the globe through the lens of memories, photography, art, poetry, et cetera. We’re launching this in the first week of August.
Kitchen of One’s Own. A collaboration between Goya and Nivaala, A Kitchen of One’s Own is a tribute to the immense culinary heritage of India and the cooks who pass these on, from generation to generation. This book is a celebration of home cooks and heirloom recipes from around the country. A collection of forty recipes, this part-cookbook, part recipe-journal takes heirloom recipes and reimagines it for the modern Indian kitchen, where tradition sits comfortably next to the contemporary. This book is for the cook who is looking to expand their repertoire with a wide variety of recipes from around India, or simply wants a beautiful journal to record their own family recipes.
Give us some insight into the process of putting together a family cookbook of generational recipes.
We also recently launched our family cookbook publishing vertical, Andaaz Publishing, in partnership with Chinmayee Manjunath. When I first spoke to Chinmayee Manjunath, we connected over the importance of gathering and preserving family recipes. Andaaz was born of this conversation and their shared passion for helping people archive and pass on heirloom recipes and family histories. Named for the instinctual way in which home cooks of the sub-continent create and pass on recipes, they want to make preserving rich culinary traditions across communities and countries the rule and not the exception.
Our aim is to democratise the creation and publishing of family cookbooks. Because every family deserves to create a beautifully designed, well-edited heirloom to pass from one generation to the next. It is not the privilege of a few, but a right that everyone should have. Andaaz works in a very structured, seamless manner. Anyone can sign up for the service using a plan of their choice and submit their recipes, with stories and a selection of images. In six to eight weeks, me, Chinmayee and their team will ship the cookbooks, anywhere in the world. The team brings their publishing expertise to each book, making sure it is of the best quality on all fronts.
What is Memories on a Plate?
It’s an upcoming anthology in partnership with The Alipore Post about the stories of food from Indian kitchens across the globe. Sharing a home cooked meal is sharing a story. There is a transformative power in uplifting the differences in how people cook and eat together. Our hope is that through the act of telling these stories of what you eat, we will bring our worlds a little closer together. This is why we’re collating this very special anthology, Memories on a Plate, to build a bigger kitchen, one with room for all of us. We seek to explore the intersection between food, memory, nostalgia and home, and expand upon it and provide a space for these conversations in the form of art, stories, essays, photography, anecdotes, poems, comics et al.
Lastly, what does Nivaala have planned for the future?
We want to continue partnering with food brands, chefs, restaurants, and home cooks to spotlight the diversity of regional micro cuisines in the country, and at the same time, inspire people to explore their own culinary roots to preserve them. We have two upcoming launches in the next couple weeks — Aam Kasundi Chutney, in partnership with Jaipur Modern Kitchen and Chef Anuroopa, and Memories on a Plate with The Alipore Post.
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Date 25-07-2023