By – Apoorva Lakshmi Kaipa

Abstract

In an age of technological disruptions and cultural fragmentation, the post-modernistic households and families learn to work between preservation and adaptation, proximity and distance, tradition and innovation. When my mom is making a specialty dish that she doesn’t normally make she immediately calls my grandma and asks what the next step would entail. Every time my sister misses home, or when she has a doubt regarding a dish she is making that our mom always makes when it is daytime here in India, she always video calls my mom to figure out what to do. When my sister is cooking while we are sleeping here in India, she googles the dish and tries to figure it out. Each method shows distinct postmodern conditions. The blending and shrinking of time and space through telecommunication, the extension of cultural authorities beyond the heads of  families, the move from tacit embodied knowledge to explicit codified information and the transformation of private domestic practices into the public digital performances. Instead of viewing technological change as cultural loss, this article shows how diaspora generations strategically navigate multiple knowledge systems to build flexible hybrid identities. The recipes my mom or my sister makes may differ from my grandmother’s original, but these dishes represent adaptation, not failure. The ongoing work of maintaining cultural connection under conditions of displacement, mediation, and transformation defines contemporary existence.

Dish: Sunnundalu

Ingredients

One cup of Minapapappu. (Black Gram)

One and a quarter cup Bellam (Jaggery)

Two illachi (cardamom)

Cup of Ghee (clarified butter)

Instructions

1.Fry minapappu till you get a nice aroma and it turns light brown in colour.

This instruction is based upon the assumption that you know how brown the light brown is. It assumes you have done this before and/or have watched someone else make this previously, or you have someone beside you to confirm it. Like most recipes passed down in families, this is written for somebody who already knows how to cook it.

For festivals, when my grandma comes to my house or when we go to hers, there are always confirmations taken for the recipes being made, smelling the dish made by the other to check if it’s perfect, a kind of well-rehearsed dance so you don’t step on each other’s feet. But when my mom is at home in Hyderabad and my grandmom is in front of her TV, watching Abhiruchi in the afternoon before taking a nap in the bed I spent my summers in, she has to mute her show to answer her daughter’s call. 

“Amma, when do I switch the gas off for frying the dal?”. 

She responds as usual, “You’ll know it when it starts smelling like when your grandma made it back in ’88”. 

How do you write down a smell? How do you measure a memory back from ’88? This is what David Sutton calls “synesthetic memory”; the knowledge that is built along multiple senses simultaneously and avoids cataloguing into steps and perfect measurements. My grandma’s “You’ll know” is not vague but a precise embodied expertise that can’t be jotted down. This phone call is not only transferring information, and is more than just resolving a doubt, but it is also what Purnima Mankekar describes as “transnational intimacy”, maintaining familial bonds and hierarchies through everyday practices like cooking.

My mom does not write the recipe down; she won’t need to. The recipe already lives in her hands from decades of observation when she sat on the counter admiring how fast her mom made ladoos, she just needs her mother’s voice to trust herself. The next time she makes these ladoos, the same call will go again; the recipe doesn’t account for the love and updates.

2.Grind it into fine powder with illachi and add powdered jaggery.

My sister lives in Chicago, where it’s 11 AM when it’s 10:30 PM here in India. She is attempting these same ladoos, but unlike our mom, she didn’t spend ’88 with our grandma and great grandma overlooking the process; she wasn’t even born then. She watched my mom make them, but watching and doing are very different.

She needs visual confirmation about the way she is making them for her friend’s potluck party. She video calls my mom and shows her the mixture, “Amma, does this look okay?” My mother says, “Did you fry the dal for too long? It looks darker than it is supposed to. “No ma, the dal here to start out was much darker in colour than what we get”. This represents how diaspora families adapt, maintaining their original roots while building new lives.

“Are the ingredients sticking to each other?” my mom asks. This is the strength and limitation of video. My mother can see but cannot smell, touch or taste. She is analysing through a single sense and correlating it with her own memory. She is trying to access tactile information through a proxy. Madianou and Miller describe this as “polymedia”. The strategic choice of a communication platform based on specific needs. My sister chose a video call over the phone because she needed that visual confirmation and needed our mother to see the rights and wrongs. 

Beyond just practicality, Loretta Baldassar writes about diaspora families creating “co-presence” through shared activities across distance. My sister is not only having the recipe trickle down to our generation, but she is also reliving the kitchen she left behind. This technology driven co-presence is more fragile, dependent on good connectivity, time zones and deliberate scheduling; but these connections are consciously chosen and actively maintained. Through the screen, my mother can see that her daughter is doing well on her own, and my sister can see the dinner my mother made, served on the same steel plates that we got from our grandparents’ house. Having these visible objects become a way to prove that home still exists, that traditions still continue. Even while staying at student accommodation, having the same cutlery I use for having midnight cravings as I did as a kid gives me the assumed sense of proximity to my family back home. Having my family see this on video call portrays the more effortful and more deliberate and valued expression of love.

3.Pour it into a big bowl and add melted ghee.

It’s 2 AM in India, my mother is asleep, and my sister needs to make these ladoos. She types up “Sunnundalu recipe” on Google and hopes for the best. Loads of websites and videos pop up. She opens up one and finds comments saying “Very nice recipe :)”, “this was my mother’s signature dish”. She opens up another one, which has the exact same recipe, but the comments differ. “This is NOT how you make it.” “The ghee is too much!” Here, we identify what Arjun Appadurai mentions. The moment you pen a piece in writing, you realise that there is no one authentic version but multiple versions. The proportions in a recipe may vary from family to family. 

While watching a YouTube video, my sister can see the aunty’s hands shaping a perfectly round ladoo, but she can’t feel the texture and can’t know if her mixture is too dry or wet until she experiments on her own. This is what Berger and Luckmann mention as recipe knowledge, the practical and taken-for-granted knowledge we inherit to navigate everyday tasks; and what Shaffer’s refinement of the same talks about how recipe knowledge is not only procedural but relationally and morally embedded. The embodied intuition of cooking comes only from repetition, which comes from experience that is validated through relationships that give it meaning.

Digital platforms like YouTube and Google have given a platform for various channels/websites like Archana’s Kitchen, Hebbar’s Kitchen, etc., which have become digital archives, preserving regional Indian recipes that might have otherwise disappeared as people move away. Signe Rousseau presents this as a shift from private domestic labour to public performance. My sister and I have taken cooking videos of my grandma and mom to keep as a memory, for future reference, and can potentially be shared online with anyone with internet access.

4.Finally, shape them into ladoos.

My mother’s and grandmother’s ladoos taste pretty similar. That “similar” and not identical owes to the tiny variations that accumulate, the way each generation adapts. My sister’s might taste slightly different because of the ingredient differences in the countries, and maybe even my aunts from my dad’s side might taste different as they learnt it differently. Immigrant women especially have the double burden of maintaining traditions while adapting to new places, as written by Vallianatos and Raine. Every ladoo has its own uniqueness and need not be authentic to one main dish but to one’s experience. 

Abbots describes cooking heritage recipes as ‘edible nostalgia’. It is a way to reconstruct home and belonging through sensory experiences. Whether it is learning in-person, by phone call, video call or YouTube, each ladoo holds its own cultural maintenance of belonging. The tradition continues, though transformed, but never broken. 

Each method reflects the material conditions of its moment. Traditions cannot be held as a singular rock that must remain untouched. It has to adapt to sustain cultural continuity across changing landscapes. Technology, in particular, hasn’t killed tradition; it has created hybrid forms we are still working towards understanding as valid. The recipe learnt on call and through an online forum might be different, but both maintain the work of diaspora, staying connected across distances and shaping identity through food. The recipes continue to grow as we learn and adapt to different cultures. The methods will differ. The table will forever grow longer, across distances to still eat together as a family. 

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(The exact recipe my mom sent me)

About the author

Apoorva is a second-year student at JGLS majoring in business administration and law. She is an avid reader and artist, actively trying to incorporate creative fields into her everyday work.