Welcome to Thakurma's Kitchen

Cooking is a ritual I inherited from my parents. It’s a practice I use to express love, whether I’m baking a cake for a friend’s birthday or making dinner for my partner. I’ve cooked professionally in restaurants and bakeries- frenetic environments built on the meditative practice of making the same dishes over and over again for hours. But as a Bengali-Korean woman raised in the U.S., cooking is the primary way I connect to my ancestors.

Thakurma’s Kitchen is a deeply personal family oral history and recipe archiving project that centers my and my family’s lifelong love of food. My pishi (“aunt” in Bengali) and I will cook our Bengali family recipes together at her home in New Delhi while she tells me stories of my family and her life growing up. Many of the recipes we’ll be cooking have been passed down from my thakurma (grandmother), who passed away when I was in high school. This project is a celebration of two incredible women and the family they have nurtured and grown over generations and across continents. My thakurma and pishi are pictured above at a 1997 New Year’s Eve party in Bangkok, where pishi’s family lived for a couple years.

Follow @thakurmaskitchen on Instagram for updates on life in Delhi and more informal “how-to” cooking videos of my family’s quicker recipes.

Stay tuned here for oral history videos and my family recipe archive.