When Recipes Carry Home Across an Ocean
“This doesn’t taste like home,” she said, pushing away the roshogolla I’d bought from the sweet shop. We were three thousand miles from Bengal, in a London flat that smelled of central heating instead of mustard oil, and suddenly I understood that distance isn’t measured in kilometers but in the gap between memory and reality.
Traditional recipes carry more than instructions—they carry the encoded identity of entire civilizations. Each dish is a time capsule containing not just flavors, but the accumulated wisdom of grandmothers, the survival strategies of communities, the stubborn insistence that this particular combination of spices defines us against all alternatives.
When immigrants open restaurants in foreign countries, they’re not just serving food—they’re creating embassies of identity, small territories where their cultural DNA can survive and replicate. But something always gets lost in translation. The tomatoes taste different, the water has different minerals, the climate requires adaptation that changes the essential character of dishes.
The roshogolla in London was technically perfect but emotionally incorrect. It contained all the right ingredients assembled in proper proportion, but it lacked the invisible component that makes food feel like heritage rather than just sustenance: the context of belonging.
“Amar ma’r moto hoy na,” I said. It’s not like my mother’s. But the problem wasn’t technique—it was that my mother’s roshogolla came seasoned with afternoon conversations, family gatherings, the particular sweetness that develops when food is prepared by hands that know your history.
Cultural identity in recipes isn’t just about preserving flavors—it’s about maintaining connection to ways of being that predate individual existence. When I make my grandmother’s kheer, I’m not just following instructions; I’m performing ritual that connects me to every woman in my lineage who stirred rice into milk while listening for children’s voices in the next room.
But this creates impossible burden for traditional foods: they must carry not just nutritional value but emotional continuity across generations and geographical distances. They must taste like childhood, like community, like the place that formed us before we knew we were being formed.
The children of immigrants face particular weight in this inheritance. For them, learning ancestral recipes isn’t just cooking—it’s claiming identity that might otherwise dissolve in the convenience of adopted culture. Each dish mastered is declaration: I belong to this story that began long before I was born.
Yet cultural authenticity in food becomes prison when it prevents evolution. The demand that traditional dishes remain unchanged across centuries ignores the reality that all recipes were once innovations, all traditional foods were once someone’s creative adaptation to available ingredients and circumstances.
Maybe the deepest cultural identity isn’t preserved in exact replication of ancestral recipes, but in understanding the principles that made those recipes necessary: the wisdom of using local ingredients, the intelligence of seasonal eating, the recognition that food creates community and community creates survival.
The roshogolla in London might not taste like home, but perhaps it tastes like the new home being created—different but not lesser, adapted but not abandoned, carrying forward what survives the journey while acknowledging what must change.
