Handwritten Recipes: What We Lose When We Screenshot

It's been six weeks since she moved to Delhi, shifted from a small town in Uttarakhand into a room in Mayur Vihar that is perfectly adequate and feels, still, like someone else's space.

The boxes are mostly open but not quite emptied, her things existing in that in-between state of belonging neither to where she came from nor entirely to where she is. She knows this feeling will pass. She is waiting for it to pass.

In the meantime, she has to eat. And so she cooks.

This was not something she had done much of before. Back home, her mother cooked. 

That was simply how it was, the way certain things are simply how they are until they aren't anymore. 

She had watched, occasionally helped, always eaten gratefully and without thinking much about it. Food arrived. It was warm and specific and exactly right. She didn't know, then, that she was being fed something beyond the meal itself.

Her mother sent her off with one thing she didn't ask for and didn't know she needed: a notebook. Old, soft-covered, the pages slightly warped from years of a kitchen that steamed in winter. Her mother's handwriting fills it from the first page, small and unhurried, the way her mother does most things.

She told me about it over the phone one evening, and I could hear something in her voice that was difficult to name. Not quite homesickness, or not only that. Something more specific.

"I made her aloo ke gutke last week," she said. "First time on my own. I kept the notebook open on the counter."

The recipe itself is simple enough, the kind of thing that looks straightforward on the page. But her mother's notebook is not just a list of ingredients. It is a document of someone's entire relationship with a dish. 

There are crossings-out and corrections, a measurement changed from one to one and a half, a note added later in slightly different ink suggesting a particular variety of mustard seed that works better in winter. 

There are small annotations that are not really about cooking at all: don't rush this part written next to a step that requires patience. Baba liked it this way next to a variation that differs from the main recipe by exactly one spice.

These are not instructions. They are a conversation, one she is only now learning to hear.

She said the aloo ke gutke didn't taste exactly like her mother's. Of course it didn't, she knows that. There are things that recipes cannot transfer: the particular heat of that particular kitchen, the altitude, the specific heaviness of her mother's hand with the jeera, thirty years of muscle memory that cannot be written down and sent in a notebook. 

But it tasted close enough to make her stand over the pot for a moment after turning off the gas, not quite ready to move on.

Delhi in January is a particular kind of cold, the kind that comes inside with you. Her room is warming up slowly, box by box, meal by meal. She has cooked her way through four recipes in the notebook so far, each one leaving its small evidence on the page, a new stain joining the old ones, her hands learning the same movements her mother's hands have always known.

She told me she reads the notebook sometimes even when she isn't cooking. Just to see the handwriting. To find the margins where her mother thought of something extra and squeezed it in.

There is a version of these recipes on the internet, she knows. Cleaner, standardised, with gram measurements and video tutorials and comment sections full of people suggesting substitutions. She has never looked them up.

"This is hers," she said simply. "I want to learn it from her."

Even from five hundred kilometres away, through smudged ink on soft paper, in a small room in Mayur Vihar where everything is still finding its place, she is.