Handwritten recipes and memories around them are always special. Thanks to an online culinary project, such treasures are being archived as a community cookbook, writes Sharmila Vaidyanathan.
As published in Deccan Herald on 13 June, 2021. Read the full article here.
Juliana Colaco’s recipe for a ‘Simple Cake’ does justice to its name. With just a few ingredients, this cake seems to be a beginner’s baking dream. But it is not the simplicity of the recipe that stays with you long after you peruse it. It is Colaco’s handwriting that takes over her diary entries between the 29th of January to the 3rd of February 1968, and a mystery ingredient following the mention of 1/2 kg sugar.
It is nuances like these that make handwritten recipes and memories around them special, and thanks to an online culinary project, such treasures are being archived in the digital world for posterity. Meet the Indian Community Cookbook Project (ICCP), a brainchild of three students from the FLAME University, Pune. For Ananya Pujary, Khushi Gupta, and Muskaan Pal this journey began as a small project for their Introduction to Digital Humanities course. Two years since its inception, the website is slowly turning into a treasure trove of community cookbooks, exciting regional recipes, and interesting analysis of India’s culinary history.
“The project was initially meant to document the recipes of my community which is the Tuluva community from Karnataka,” says Pujary. “A lot of our recipes have not been documented in the written format, and we thought that we could create an online repository for them,” she adds. As the team began researching into this concept, they realised that this was a common phenomenon across several communities in the Indian subcontinent. “This is how we expanded the project to include other states as well,” the team explains.
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