"It's not just about writing recipes"
Author and supper club host Sapna Ajwani on her cookbook, Sindh. Plus a recipe for dry spiced cauliflower from the book
Sapna Ajwani, who runs the supper club Sindhi Gusto in London and is the author of the cookbook Sindh: Recipes and Stories from a Forgotten Land (whose cookbook I have edited), is my guest this week. We sat down for an hour’s conversation on the importance of representing history alongside recipes, connecting with other Sindhis, tangible and intangible memories, the pain of Partition, and more. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Apoorva: Hi Sapna, thank you so much for being here.
Sapna: Thanks Apoorva for having me. And it's lovely to see you after so long.
Apoorva: How long has the book been in the making?
Sapna: The idea came to my mind in the middle of 2019. I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve been talking to people around late October that year and then that’s when I learnt about this relaxation in rules for visiting Pakistan from one of my friends here. I was toying with the idea of when should I go, should I first do all of my research here with the diaspora in India and abroad and then go to Sindh for my research. I said let me do that [go to Sindh] as quickly as possible. More than three years you can say? Almost four years.
Apoorva: I know this is difficult to condense into something brief, but what was that journey like? Did you envision it would take you four-five years?
Sapna: It was very interesting to be honest, because like I said I never just wanted it to be a recipe book because that’s so boring. [For me] it was more about trying to understand why are we eating what are we eating, how is it connected to our past or where we come from… and the more I read about it (thanks to the British Library and the online resources), my fascination just kept growing and the whole challenge was about condensing that information in a readable way. How do you make it relatable without people falling asleep?