Jenny Mallin has written a book. This book contains recipes. But, it is not a cookbook. “I’d describe it as a heritage book on generations of an Anglo-Indian family with their recipes,” says the author, based in Berkshire, U.K. Jenny’s book, titled A Grandmother’s Legacy , chronicles the stories of five generations of women from her family, who lived in India through the days of the British Raj.
Her great-great-great grandmother Wilhelmina (born 1828), who hailed from Vellore and moved to Madras once she was married, used to compile her recipes in a book. “I think it was, firstly, for discipline and order of the house, and secondly, to make sure that the cook knew what the family liked. Because some of the food was English, you see; there was the Yorkshire pudding and the Victoria sponge cake, but also the korma and the pulav.” This book was then passed on to her daughter, Ophelia (born 1855), who lived in Mylapore. She, for her part, added her own recipes to this collection, before she gave it to her daughter, Maud. “What’s interesting is that Maud was making Yorkshire pudding in Madras a hundred years after her great grandfather Benjamin Hardy, a foot soldier with the British Army, first left his home in Yorkshire, England, to set sail to India.” From there, the book passed on to Maud’s daughter, Irene, who was a governess to Benazir Bhutto while she lived in Rawalpindi. This old, massive ledger of recipes then came to Jenny’s mother, Cynthia.
The collection, dating back 170 years, came interwoven with history, and if one looked more closely, gave insights into the lives of these women. “In my grandma Maud’s time, the Railways were still opening up and her husband was a Permanent Way Inspector. Through her recipes, you could tell she was travelling. You know she’d gone down to Kerala because there’s a recipe for fish molee. There are recipes for dodols and kalkals — which her ancestors had never done — telling you she’d gone to Goa.” While she says Irene was doing curries without onions because she was in Rawalpindi, which had a sizeable Jain population then, she thinks Wilhelmina had a Hindu cook because of the om symbols on the pages. “You can learn, like Sherlock Holmes, so much more about these women through their recipes.”
Jenny’s mother Cynthia, herself, did not add to this ledger. “My mother had to work, though she didn’t want to. So her recipes, she’d type them out in a typewriter and give to her children when they got married.” Cynthia, incidentally, was the first one to move back to England in generations. When they left India post Partition, the U.K., in 1953, was experiencing one of its most gruelling winters. “Since all the pipes were frozen, my mother would tell me stories about how they had to take a saucepan and head to the public baths to have a wash there.” What was also difficult for Cynthia, whose culinary expertise lay in making curries, was being unable to source spices. “She couldn’t get her chillies, garlic, cloves and cinnamon. So she used Worcester sauce, mustard, soy sauce and ketchup, just to give her food a bit of life.” When the spices arrived in London in the 60s, Sunday meals inevitably became yellow coconut rice, pepper water and meatball curry. Jenny herself started cooking when she was five, and has been doing so for the last 50 years. The love for food, she says, is something that connects all the women in her family — across time.
So Jenny’s book, a massive project that took her five years to complete, includes 70 Anglo-Indian recipes from the family’s collection, which she’s tested and tweaked, and snippets from the lives of these women who contributed to them. You know she means it when she says her book is 80 per cent memoir, because, it has pictures and stories from her travels around India, details of the fairytale love affair between her parents, anecdotes about her ancestors, snapshots of the original recipes — some written with a quill on parchment — from the old ledger book, old marriage certificates, faded family photographs and more. So what does a lay reader get out of such a personal book? “People can see inside five generations of a family. They can feel like they know them.”
How did this project happen?
“It happened through grief actually. My mother was bedridden and my father, her carer, passed away of a heart attack.” Jenny, at the time, was in the Himalayas and could not be contacted. “It was all very dramatic. So everything hit the fan on the 19th of November, five years ago.” When she got to her mother’s side five days later, she swore never to leave it. “During that time, even for me, conversation would run dry.” So drawing on their love for food, she decided to resurrect the old book of family recipes. “I’d try the recipes and my mother would chip in with ideas; reduce the sugar or add more ginger. Together, we’d perfect a recipe and then move to the next one.”
Jenny’s book is priced at Rs. 3,699.
