A cup of intuition, a pinch of imprecision bakes a new Indian-Jewish cookbook

My Bombay-born grandmother baked a spectacular apple pie. I was already in my late twenties by the time Grandma Hilda died, yet I never thought to ask for her recipe. It’s still one of my greatest regrets. With my mother now in her mid-seventies, I was determined not to make the same mistake.

Last year, I started asking Mum how to cook some of my favourite dishes from our small Indian-Jewish community, such as chakla bakla (pickled vegetables), chittarnee (tomato-based chicken curry) and cheese samoosas (cheese-filled pastries). Along the way, I decided to write a cookbook so I could – in the words of the late food historian, Gil Marks – “spread the culinary wealth”.

I’m thrilled that Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi will soon be released. Capturing the recipes, however, proved more challenging than I’d expected.

Many Indian-Jewish dishes – and here I’m referring to the food of the Jews of India who were originally from Iraq, like my family – are a synthesis of Iraqi and Indian cooking. The cuisine has mostly been kept alive by hand rather than the written word. This means the women in the community tend to cook by feel, intuition and tasting as they go. (There are a handful of capable male cooks but it’s the women who hold most of the expertise.) My mother, for example, stores many of her recipes in her head.

Admittedly, Mum has attempted to document some of her dishes. But I found her so-called recipes infuriating to follow, with vague quantities such as “some” cumin powder and “a bit of” garam masala, and instructions like “put in oven” – with no temperature specified.

The most perplexing were her instructions for making coriander chutney. Add two plastic cups of water and one plastic cup of desiccated coconut – as if plastic cups are a standardised measurement. When I complained about her lack of precision, I didn’t get any sympathy.