In India, culinary knowledge doesn’t usually come from books, but rather, from memories of home, love and identity, passed down generation after generation. Each recipe changes with time, evolving into something new, each child adding something of their own. Chutney, a simple dish often made with whatever is at hand, perhaps captures this tradition better than most foods. “It’s thrifty, it’s frugal, it’s inventive, it’s creative and it’s easy,” says journalist and author Sudha G Tilak. “Sometimes you just need to pick up fresh ingredients and just bash it up and make a chutney.”
With just that much, the chutney has a charm of its own, and also makes an interesting subject for a book. When a recipe that has lived in the webs of memory, conversation and instinct is put on a page, it has to be something that another person can understand and recreate. For Tilak, that meant approaching Chutney Chronicles (Bloomsbury) with both the intimacy of someone who grew up around these flavours and the curiosity of a journalist. “I approached it journalistically,” she says.
No fixed formula
The journey began with her mother’s handwritten book of recipes. But Tilak did not want to turn those recipes into another catalogue of maternal nostalgia. “I didn’t want to make it very personal,” she says, while recalling how her friend said how tired she was of grandmother’s tales when it came to food. Her mother’s book became a starting point from where she started exploring chutneys beyond their flavours. The ingredients, histories, regions and associations all came into picture. And the further she looked, the larger the world became.
In Chutney Chronicles, traditional preparations sit alongside the slightly unconventional green apple and jamun, flowers and leaves. Her exploration takes her to chutneys made with red ants in Chhattisgarh and fish in the Northeast. For Tilak, there is something about a food that does not insist on a fixed formula. “Chutney kind of frees you up, you know,” she says.
Aiming for precision
That freedom, however, did not mean that writing the recipes could be equally loose. Tilak’s experience working with an American platform on holistic eating had exposed her to a very different approach to cookbook publishing. Recipes were tested, tasted and revised before they reached the reader. Recipe testers could alter quantities when something did not work. “Two teaspoons of oil becomes three teaspoons of oil,” she recalls. “They are very precise.” The process was “an eye-opener”. It also made her think about how cookbooks are produced and used in India, where repeated testing, editing, photography and production can make them expensive to put together. For Tilak, the effort matters because a cookbook is not merely meant to be read. She remembers gifting a cookbook to a friend and being delighted when the friend actually cooked from it.
“There is a culture of just not using cookbooks as a coffee table,” she says, contrasting it with the practice of “actually putting them on your countertop and cooking off them.” That distinction runs quietly through Chutney Chronicles. The recipes are accompanied by small memories, anecdotes and contextual notes, but Tilak’s interest does not stop at recollection. She researched the subject, tested the recipes herself and sometimes waited for ingredients to come into season before she could complete them. She also photographed the food herself.
Improvisations welcome
The personal remains important, though. Tilak speaks of her mother with the complicated familiarity of someone whose relationship with her was shaped as much by the kitchen as by anything else. “It’s not easy to get away from the shadow of your mother,” she says, recalling a generation of women for whom cooking was not merely domestic work but often one of the few spaces they could call their own.
Yet Chutney Chronicles deliberately moves beyond that one kitchen. A recipe becomes a way of following an ingredient into another region; a memory opens into a story; a seemingly minor accompaniment reveals the ingenuity of the people who make it.
That may be the book’s most interesting proposition. Chutney does not need to be dressed up as something grand. It can remain inexpensive, improvised and everyday. What changes is the attention paid to it. Tilak’s book takes knowledge that has traditionally travelled from kitchen to kitchen and gives it another route onto the page, through research, testing and photographs, and eventually back into another kitchen.
Her hope is simple. “I would like to think that this book is going to be a nice chat about many things over a dish of chutney,” she says. For a food that occupies such little space on the plate, there is quite a lot to talk about.