Who carried the kitchen into the present?
For centuries, women cooked and carried recipes from one generation to the next; yet their work was rarely considered a “profession,” nor their knowledge recognized as “expertise.”
At Seraf, Asma Khan, who placed the culinary knowledge of immigrant women at the heart of London’s Darjeeling Express, joined Sinem Özler, whose work with women producers and cooperatives across Anatolia is integral to her cooking. That evening, more than two chefs came together: From Kolkata to Anatolia, two great repositories of women’s culinary memory met at the same table.
Who carries the memory of a cuisine? Those who write its recipes into books, those who make them visible in restaurants, or those who cook the same dishes for years without ever writing them down, learning by watching their mothers and teaching their daughters in turn? That was the question running through my mind the other evening at Seraf, as I sat down to a dinner prepared by Asma Khan and Sinem Özler. Because what I was witnessing was not simply a meeting of India and Anatolia, but the story of women who have sustained the cuisines of two different geographies for centuries, yet whose names have so often been absent from the written history of gastronomy.
