When Taste Is a Memory You Can’t Cook Back
The smell hit me first—cardamom and burned onions, a combination that should have been wrong but felt like archaeology of the senses. I was standing in Happy’s kitchen, watching her attempt my grandmother’s kacchi biriyani, the recipe scribbled on a torn envelope in my mother’s desperate handwriting from 2016, the year before everything changed.
“Ektu beshi garam masala diyechi,” Happy murmured, tasting the rice. Too much spice. Always too much or too little, never that impossible perfect balance that lived only in my grandmother’s palms.
But my grandmother’s palms had been dust for eight years now.
I stared at the recipe—“rice: 2 cups, meat: 1 kg, onions: 3 medium”—and felt the hollowness that comes when you realize measurement can never capture intuition. How do you translate “a pinch of this, a handful of that” into the precise language of recreation? How do you document the way she’d sniff the pot and add salt not by teaspoon but by some inner compass that calibrated perfectly to our family’s specific hunger?
“She never wrote anything down,” my mother had said during those final hospital days, her voice carrying the weight of imminent loss. “I should have watched more carefully.”
But we were all guilty of the same arrogance—believing that some knowledge is permanent, that the people who carry our traditions are immortal, that their hands will always be available to guide ours.
The Sufi mystic Rumi wrote about the beloved who leaves only traces in the dust. But what of the beloved who leaves only traces in our taste buds, memories our tongues chase but can never quite catch? My grandmother didn’t just die; entire ecosystems of flavor died with her. Not just recipes, but the context that made them sacred—the stories she told while stirring, the prayers she whispered into the steam, the way she could predict the exact moment when the rice would surrender to the meat.
Every culture understands this particular orphanhood. The Japanese have a word, tsubo, for the pot that knows its master’s touch so completely that it can never be properly used by another. The Italians speak of la mano della nonna—grandmother’s hand—as an ingredient that can never be substituted or replicated.
But we, in our modern hubris, believed we could Google our way back to ancestral kitchens.
“Baba, why doesn’t Mama’s biriyani taste like Dadi’s?” Arash asked once, his child’s palate unwittingly becoming archaeology, comparing layers of memory he didn’t know he possessed.
Because your Dadi’s recipes weren’t just instructions, I should have told him. They were autobiography. Each dish was a chapter in the book of her becoming—how she learned to adjust for the weak flame of her first stove, how she compensated for the different salinity of Dhaka water versus village water, how she modified traditional recipes to accommodate my grandfather’s delicate stomach and my father’s sweet tooth.
Her biriyani wasn’t a recipe; it was a living document of sixty years of small adaptations, each meal a revision in the ongoing manuscript of our family’s taste.
Now we’re left with the tragedy of approximation. Happy tries, God knows she tries, following the ghost-instructions with devotion that borders on desperation. But her biriyani tastes like loving imitation, not like home. And the cruelest part isn’t that it tastes different—it’s that I can no longer remember exactly what my grandmother’s tasted like, only that it was perfect in a way that’s now lost to language.
This is how traditions die: not in dramatic moments of rejection, but in the quiet spaces between generations, in the assumption that transmission is automatic, that love is enough to preserve what requires daily practice to maintain.
I watch Happy taste the rice again, her face carrying the particular disappointment of the apprentice who has lost her master. And I realize we’re not just missing recipes—we’re missing the entire context that made those recipes possible. The village where my grandmother learned to cook, the wood-fired ovens, the specific breed of rice that grew in her mother’s fields, the rhythms of a life where cooking wasn’t convenience but ceremony.
“Maybe we should just order from the restaurant,” Happy suggests, defeat seasoning her words.
But I shake my head. Because this failed biriyani, this loving approximation, this beautiful failure—this too is our tradition now. The tradition of trying to remember, of honoring what we’ve lost by attempting what we can never quite recover.
My grandmother’s recipes died with her, yes. But something else was born in that death—our desperate, loving, imperfect attempts to resurrect not just flavors, but the love that originally seasoned them.
And maybe, in some way, that’s its own kind of recipe.
