The second day of The Hindu Lit Fest 2024 unfolded on Saturday at the Pavilion, Lady Andal School, and a fatigued audience was turned enthusiastic by the mention of food and memories in a fitting pre-lunch panel titled A Taste of Memory: A Celebration of Food and Family. Moderated by Deepa S. Reddy, the panel featured chef and culinary historian Rakesh Raghunathan, and writer and culinary historian Tarana Hussain Khan.
“I was never a foodie, maybe a foodie in denial. When I came back to Rampur, to my ancestral home, I started researching about the culture and there were so many little stories about food,” Ms. Khan said on how she stumbled upon the revival of heirloom recipes.
Her research began at the Raza Library in Rampur, a huge repository of manuscripts, where she found 12 Persian handwritten manuscripts dating from 1816 till the 1880s, and that’s where the Forgotten Foods project with the University of Sheffield began.
Read more: Holding on to food, bonding over spices, and the taste of memory
