My Mum left me more than a dozen handwritten recipe books where she wrote Every. Single. Thing. she knew how to cook, she spent hours writing a recipe using her four-color ballpoint pen- the title in red, the ingredients in black, the method in blue, and notes in green! These books are my culinary heritage, my virasat, and from them, I cook with the same love and dedication she poured into every meal, I want to do the same by leaving a digital recipe footprint for my kids.  Most of my posts are dedicated to describing recipes that I make at home for our table, occasionally you will see recipes that I have begged, borrowed, or recreated.

During the lockdown of spring of 2020, my wildest dreams of being a stay-at-home Mum came true, the kids were home and hungry, and I was happy to cook, but by that summer the novelty of cooking eight meals a day quickly wore off, and in-lieu of an all-inclusive vacation, we decided to let the kids loose in the kitchen to cook for us—so not the same, but the kids had turns helping make the meals, and I had to practice patience, for them to learn valuable life skills.  That’s when someone suggested creating an Instagram page to share these recipes. Thus, @Spicymemsahib was born.  I eventually started to write down recipes for my kids, associating a story with each one. I created written images not only to keep my food memories alive but also to honor my family, especially the women who worked so hard and passed down skills from one generation to another, but received so little recognition.

My children, when available serve as the official in-house photographers (using the iPhone), video shooters, and taste testers for all the recipes I post.  I cook intuitively, and therefore, recipes that I post (that are not my Mum’s which are almost all written in precisely measured amounts) are measured and remeasured to make sure they work for you.  I want anyone who tries a recipe to have never wasted ingredients and encourage them to continue cooking and feeding themselves, their families, and friends…around their own tables.

In 2014 we lost my Mum and my Mother-in-law in a space of few weeks of each other.  My Mum was my best friend, my greatest support system and confidant, and I was my Ma-law’s “fourth” daughter.  They were phenomenal cooks, and each with a different style of cooking. My Mum’s scrupulous attention to seasoning and presentation transformed a simple dish into a culinary masterpiece, everything measured down to a T, vegetables were cut uniformly, and each meal and thali, an explosion of flavors and textures consisting of an appetizer or farsaan, papad, two vegetables, a dhal, salad, raita, pickles, rice, roti, and dessert, and her final presentation a well-balanced meal was a feast for your eyes. She was a vegetarian but regularly cooked meat for the family. My Ma-in-law was a self-taught cook, married young into a large family, she learned how to feed a crowd and more, she utilized what she had on hand, a scientist in her kitchen if you will, always experimenting with flavors and spices.  My first training started with my Ba– my maternal grannie who taught me how to cook a proper Indian thali and set the table for a six-course meal by the time I was 10.  Almost all the vegetarian, desserts, and baking recipes you see here, I learned from my Mum, and all the meat recipes, except for a few come from my Ma-in-law.

Cuisine to me is also a reflection of a country’s history – war, invasion, and immigration of people.  I keep our traditions alive through cooking in honor of grandmothers whose stories capture the cultural trade winds from Gujarat, India to the coast of East Africa, preserving recipes passed on for centuries, whose only measuring instrument was their eyeball- yes, they could eyeball a tablespoon of turmeric or spice from a mile away! 

I not aiming to become a food blogger extraordinaire, but just attempting to preserve and honor a fading way of cooking in our fast-paced world, where sometimes there’s no time to cook or because it’s intimidating.  I want to inspire confidence in my kids in their ability to create delicious and easy meals from scratch and recreate memories that only home-cooked meals can spark, and always follow the advice my Mum gave me “Be sure to cook a little extra just in case someone turns up for lunch”

Words followed the trade winds and the Arab and Persian traders along the Indian Ocean. The traders and settlers who settled and traded along the Eastern shores of Africa had to find a lingua franca- a common language to enable them to communicate for trading purposes.

Swahili is a rich combination of Bantu and borrowed words from Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and later German. For hundreds of years, the Portuguese controlled the coasts of Africa.  The Swahili word Meza (table) is thought to be borrowed from Omani Arabic (mēz) or the Persian (mêz), which have Latin roots in the word mēnsa’ (table) or ‘altar’ which would evolve into the Spanish and the Portuguese word ‘mesa’(table).

My earliest memories all seemed to have happened around my grandparents sprawling grand tables. The whole family from the eldest to the youngest sat down for breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner.  It was where, I would listen to them share stories of their day, reconnect, make important life decisions, conduct business transactions with guests, and break bread with strangers invited to join for a meal.

So, for me, the very essence of home is gathering around the dinning table. Over the years I have learned that our table wasn’t simply where we sat to eat, but rather a memory box, and the central nervous system of our family if you will, where life was shared, visions projected, dreams were perceived, and broken hearts mended. The conversations were full of laughter, tears, and sometimes even anger depending on what emotions one brought to the table that day, but mostly where family stories were passed around the table as predictably as the bowl achaar.

All my life, like clockwork the setting and clearing of the table was never-ending, the schedule was dictated by the workday, after breakfast, once the men left for work, it was set again for the 10 O’clock tea with neighbors who would casually drop in for a chat on their way to the market, then cleared and set up for lunch, and after lunch, time to flip the tablecloth and set the table once more for afternoon tea, or kitty parties, and finally dinner.  Even after dinner, there were always snacks laid out for late-night heart-to-heart conversations and hungry teens. 

I was born in Tanzania, East Africa, and grew up all around the world, India, England, and the United States. I call beautiful Northern Virginia my home now. Tanzania is renowned for its snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro – Africa’s highest and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world– its wildlife safaris, lush savannas, and the odyssey, known as the Great Migration, its tropical beaches of white sand, pristine coral reefs and turquoise waters, Lake Victoria (Africa’s largest lake) Lake Tanganyika (Africa’s deepest lake) and the spice islands of Zanzibar Archipelago where my maternal great-great grandparents traveling on dhows and steamships tracing the ancient trade routes from India to Africa, first landed, then traveled inland and settled as merchants, farmers and dukawala’s (shop owners).

I married my best friend, and in 1999, we decided to move, to the US, we left our country, our home, our families, and our sense of belonging and started as immigrants just as our forefathers had.  Today we try our best to raise our kids to take pride in their identity, which is not easy especially when you are so far away from family, to able to identify with their grandmothers legendary desi cooking; about their great-great-grandfather, once First Deputy Prime Minister of India who marched alongside Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle for India’s freedom; about their grandparents who survived three civil wars, and lived in more than a dozen countries.

I value my mixed heritage and where I come from, I keep our traditions alive through cooking. Each dish is associated with a memory or a story and every night Tanzania takes its seat at our dinner table, sandwiched between the places we have left behind, and the memories we carry forth.

Sometimes this space will be filled with what’s new and next but mostly preserving a cultural legacy and celebrating and honoring the matriarchs of my family, my Grandmothers, my Mum, and my Ma-in-law,  and passing the passion for cooking, its authenticity, craftsmanship and rich heritage to the next generation.  

My writing and cooking fosters connections to food history and heritage.  The most basic recipes will tell you how to prepare something to eat, and at their best, they are concrete instructions that open your mind and taste buds as never before.  Without the basic cooking context, we are isolated from the people and cultures who created the dishes we crave.  It’s an enormous loss for many of us who are far away from home and need to feel the connection.  What I have learned has been passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, so when I share it with the rest of the world it’s in the form of what we refer to as “Sadaqah Jariyah”  or a ‘continuous, ongoing, perpetually flowing charity’ that lasts forever – beyond the grave, a charity for those on whose shoulders I stand, my Grannies, my Mum, and my MA in-law.

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