Description

Over four years, food writer Niloufer Hadi travelled across twenty Indian cities and forty villages — from a Chettinad kitchen in Karaikudi to a Kashmiri Pandit home in Sopore, from a Bohra dawat in Bhendi Bazaar to a Naga Sunday lunch in Kohima — collecting recipes from the women her hosts called *amma, dadi, nani, naniamma, ammachi, ajji, badi maa.*

What she came home with was 108 recipes — and 108 quietly extraordinary lives.

*Dadi’s Notebook* is a cookbook that doubles as a portrait of vanishing Indian domestic knowledge. Here is the Coorgi pandi curry as it was cooked in 1967 by a planter’s wife in Pollibetta. The exact proportions of garam masala that distinguished three sisters in Lucknow. The Bengali widow’s recipe for posto without onion or garlic. The Sindhi sai bhaji that a Karachi-born grandmother has been making in Pune since 1948. The chukandar gosht that a Hyderabadi nawab’s cook taught her granddaughter the year before he died.

Each recipe is paired with the story of the woman who taught it — her kitchen, her marriage, her city, her sorrows — and illustrated with hand-drawn ingredient maps and full-colour photographs of the dishes themselves.

More than a cookbook, *Dadi’s Notebook* is a love letter to the unrecorded culinary genius of Indian women. A book to cook from. A book to read aloud. A book to keep on the kitchen counter until the spine cracks.