Go on a journey through Indian food memories with this lovely food memoir

A beautiful food memoir celebrates a life of cooking and nourishing with its collection of beloved recipes and precious memories. – Photo: Nicky Almasy

For years, acclaimed cooking teacher Manju Saigal had been trying to get a cookbook off the ground. Having taught Indian cookery in Kuala Lumpur since 2000, Manju’s bounty of recipes had been growing with every passing year.

“Many years back, I did start working on a book with one of my students. It was meant to be a teaching tool; not a cookbook. Along with that, there were stories of my childhood because to me, I always felt like I wanted to make not just a record of recipes but also the people who have made me what I am,” says Manju.

In the intervening years, life got in the way as Manju’s children got married and her grandchildren came along. Slowly but surely, the focus on the book petered out, although Manju was convinced it would come to fruition when the time was right.

Then one day, many years later, Manju’s friend Bettina Chua Abdullah, an award-winning international business news anchor and writer came over for tea. And that was the start of their shared journey towards making a beautiful food memoir called To Nourish with Love: Flavours and Memories from Mussoorie to Malaysia.

“I wasn’t interested in writing a cookbook. I love food and I am very interested in food, so for me to have spent X number of months and years simply sorting and organising recipes, I was not going to learn very much. So I learnt very much doing it this way, because writing for me answers questions.

“And Manju wanted to leave something behind for her family, because the world that she grew up in has changed so drastically, so her grandchildren won’t experience it the same way she did, but now they will have a record of what it was like to grow up in Mussoorie,” says Bettina.

Memories from childhood and beyond

Bettina (left) and Manju spent over two years putting together To Nourish with Love, which is a beautifully written food memoir amplified by Manju’s rich repertoire of memories and recipes. — NICKY ALMASY

To get the project off the ground, Bettina and Manju embarked on a trip to Mussoorie, a cool hillside town in India that Manju grew up in. This formed the starting point for Manju’s culinary odyssey and her insatiable curiousity and interest in food, driven in large part by her grandfather, who inspired her interest in the provenance of ingredients.

It was also Mussorie and Jalandhar in Punjab (where Manju’s grandfather went to live) that formed Manju’s most cherished childhood memories.

“Mussoorie was fairly undersized, it had a few little food shops in little nooks and corners, so that was like such a fascinating experience just going to one of those little stalls.

“When we went to Punjab, it was connecting with the earth, there were fields, you could go and get fresh sugarcane out of the fields and in the winter, there was mustard growing everywhere – that was the main crop.

“In the mornings, my grandfather and I would walk to a dairy farm, all bundled up in blankets. We would stand there and watch farmers milk the buffaloes, then we would take the milk and walk back. Those were some of my cherished memories growing up.

“It was just a very happy, simple time and I really wish I could somehow make it possible for the youngsters in the family to share that, but unfortunately even in Punjab, that has disappeared – it is just gone,” laments Manju.

From the seeds of Manju’s memories and her need to share them for posterity with her grandchildren, there emerged the first shred of an idea for To Nourish with Love. As Bettina listened to Manju’s stories and as they travelled together through Mussoorie, ideas for the book began to flow.

“In the beginning, she would basically just talk to me about what it was like to grow up in Mussoorie, what schooling was like, what the town was like.

“And I would mainly listen and record things and then play it back and realise that she said something that I didn’t ask about, then I would go and do research and come across something and message her back and say ‘Oh, I found this interesting’, and she would elaborate,” explains Bettina.

The trip to Mussoorie took place in early 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic first reared its ugly head. Over the following two years, Manju (who is based in Malaysia) and Bettina (who spent 13 months in lockdown in London) went back and forth with information, stories and recipes before finally progressing to doing the recipe shoots and styling.

Mummy ka malpura is one of Manju’s mother’s signature treats and she remembers being fascinated with it as a child. — NICKY ALMASY

“We ended up with nine drafts! So it was a long process and I think the happiest times was when I was discovering some new things, so there was a lot of immersion into Indian culture and it was not as clear cut as ‘Here are recipes, write it down’,” says Bettina.

When the time came to photograph and style the recipes, Bettina and Manju pooled together their considerable collection of tableware (Bettina has spent 30 years collecting old plates) and textiles and got to work. Bettina’s aim was to ensure that the pictures looked home-spun as opposed to the picture perfect, polished shots so often seen in glossy cookbooks everywhere.

“Quite a lot of food books that you look at, the food is on a white plate and shot from the top, but I wanted it to look like you had cooked your own food and posted it on Instagram.

“And when you shoot food, you have decisions to make, like the kokum rasam (hot and sour kokum broth) in the book was shot when it was plated but not completely cooked and the meen manga kari (Kerala fish and mango curry) was not yet cooked.

“Sometimes you make decisions because you know actually the cooked version is not very beautiful but when you do the shots where you can scatter other ingredients around, you can make very pretty shots,” says Bettina.

The book

To Nourish with Love reflects all the love, energy and thought that has been poured into it over the years and is written largely in Manju’s voice, with Bettina capturing the soul and essence of each recipe and memory and guiding the more structured, educational elements in the book. As a consequence, the book makes for smooth – and enlightening reading, moving seamlessly through recipes, nostalgia, the present and the culinary ties that bind.

Interestingly, the book is also divided into chapters like sweet, sour, fresh, salty, hot and bitter, unlike conventional cookbooks where separation is often based on chapters like meat and seafood, etc. According to Bettina, this was entirely by design.

“Before we went on this trip, I had done a little research looking at Indian cookbooks and the way these books were structured and one of the things that I felt I wanted to explore was not what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner but what I wanted to understand, was how to achieve different flavours so you understand that every dish has a process and it has its own skeleton, it has its bones, that’s why you make this dish this way.

“How to achieve certain flavours was what fascinated me the most, because you have to look at produce and how it is grown, and go down fascinating rabbit holes, which is why it took quite a while,” says Bettina.

Makki roti is one of Manju’s favourite recipes in the book as it is a simple, home-cooked meal that her mother would make when she was young. — NICKY ALMASY

The recipes are nearly entirely meals that Manju has cooked before, with plenty of gorgeous food photographs (taken mostly by photographer Nicky Almasy) peppered throughout. The meals traverse Manju’s past and present with fluidity, encompassing the food of her childhood in Mussoorie and Punjab; things she learnt when she married and moved to Malaysia, her extended family’s Kerala and Maharashtrian roots as well as recipes she herself has picked up over the years.

“I grew up in a Punjabi home and married into a Punjabi home in Malaysia and didn’t have any idea of south Indian cooking. My mother-in-law was Punjabi but she spoke better Tamil than Hindi and her style of cooking was more south Indian.

“So I have always been keen to learn and experiment and also many of the youngsters in the family got married outside of the community. My daughter married a Maharashtrian and I have included some of those recipes in the book and my niece married someone from Kerala, so those recipes became part of our regular meals. So you will find recipes from every nook and corner in India,” says Manju.

As a collection of recipes, the book covers a rich gamut, with plenty of fantastic-looking Indian dishes like jackfruit masala, Sindhi-style fish in green chilli masala, paneer tikki, spicy Karachi chicken, Amritsari street-style fried fish, lentil dumpling in chilled yoghurt, tiny stuffed bittergourd and so much more.

Each recipe also has the original name of the dish written phonetically as well as in Hindi (Manju’s sister-in-law was roped in to check that it was accurate) with Hindi names also appearing in the ingredient lists. Chapter openers also provide eye-opening information like how India is the world’s largest producer of lemons and limes!

Manju says some of her favourite recipes in the book are the ones that inevitably have back stories that have left an indelible impression on her.

“There is the dessert called Mummy ka malpura (fried semolina and flour pancakes), which is one of my favourites. So I remember my mother used to make it in huge quantities and distribute to all the family and close friends and it was one of the things she was well known for.

“As a child, I was fascinated by how she would drop the batter and it would be crisp outside and soft in the centre – it was one of our favourite desserts. And most Indian desserts in north India, we use cardamom but this one uses fennel and it is a lovely sort of flavour and the bits will stay in your mouth. Somewhere later in the day a little seed will be stuck in your teeth and you can chew on it!

“Then there’s another dish called methi aloo (fenugreek greens with potatoes). This uses the leaf of the fenugreek plant and when I would go back to Mussoorie, even when it is not in season, our cook would go to the mountains and forage for methi and we would eat this dish. And if I could, I would eat it every single day!” says Manju.

Manju wanted to record all her food memories from her childhood for her grandchildren, as that way of life has since disappeared. – Photo: SC Shekar

While the recipes are rich and rewarding, the true soul of this book is the memoir aspect, which is what gives it an intrinsically human touch and an edge.

From the tale of the daily bread, or roti, that was the mainstay of meals at St Xavier’s (the boarding house that Manju’s mother Vimla Kapur operated) to the enchanting story about the nuns who taught Manju at school later serving breakfast to her new family the day after her wedding – every special moment, philosophy and the wisdom associated with some of these culinary adventures is written so beautifully that it feels almost transcendental, like you are there in that time and place too.

“A lot of what Manju talked about about paid homage to values and ideas that she has picked up from her grandmother and parents and people in her life and I thought if you are going to leave something for your descendants, why leave just recipes, why not leave your thoughts as well?” says Bettina.

Leaving a legacy

A beautiful food memoir celebrates a life of cooking and nourishing with its collection of beloved recipes and precious memories. – Photo: Nicky Almasy

Both Manju and Bettina believe that food, recipes and memories should be recorded and documented because it is only from understanding the past that we can make sense of the present and move forward.

“Food used to be the core in the past. The kitchen is still the heart of the home now, but all the things around it are not there. We don’t do the farming or pickling – that is not the centre anymore. So if you don’t write it down, you will forget,” says Bettina.

Ultimately, for Manju, while she hopes that the book will serve as a record of her memories for her grandchildren to read and understand when they are older, she hopes readers too will take something away from To Nourish with Love. And no, it’s not just an arsenal of new recipes (although that’s a bonus too).

“Basically, I hope more than the recipes, I would like people to sort of celebrate all that is good in their lives. Focus on that, not so much on the recipes, because recipes you will probably pick up when you are when interested in cooking.

“But most of all, I would like for people to know about the importance of nourishing others and of honouring people who are important and the food itself – it is so precious,” says Manju.

To Nourish with Love: Flavours and Memories from Mussoorie to Malaysia is priced at RM200 and is available at the Gerak Budaya Bookshop Penang (www.gerakbudayapenang.com).