Before recipes became searchable, scrollable, and endlessly replicable, they were fleeting.
They existed in moments, on television screens, in conversations, in memory. If you missed it, you missed it. And if you wanted to hold on to it, you wrote it down. There was no archive to return to, no algorithm to serve it back to you. Just attention, instinct, and the urgency of not letting something slip away.
I must have been around 9 or 10 when I first witnessed this urgency up close. Every afternoon, sometime between 2 and 4, my mum would sit in front of the television watching Khana Khazana. There was no pause button, no rewind. Just one chance to catch everything. She would scribble as the chef spoke, trying to capture ingredients and steps. And then came the final screen, the full recipe flashing up for less than a minute. That was the real test. Quantities, timings, all of it had to be written down before it disappeared.
I would sit next to her, watching, asking questions that only a child could ask. If the recipe used boneless fish, I genuinely believed fish could be born without bones. She would laugh, explain, and go back to writing. Those afternoons were quiet, unhurried, but filled with intent.
That notebook still exists. It is my go-to.
It is also completely chaotic. There are arrows connecting steps, shorthand that only she understands, notes squeezed into margins “add this with that,” “do this before that.” It makes no sense if you are looking for precision. But it makes perfect sense if you are looking for memory.
And that, I think, is what makes those handwritten recipes so powerful. They are not just about food. They are about a time when information wasn’t instantly accessible, when recipes were earned, noted down, and held on to. There was value in paying attention.
I remember one dish in particular, paneer matar. We did not grow up eating it. It wasn’t part of our daily food, especially not in a largely non-vegetarian household. But she must have seen it on television, or picked it up from somewhere, and decided to make it.
It never tasted the same twice. And yet, it was always delicious.
That is the thing about home cooking. It doesn’t chase consistency the way professional kitchens do. It chases a feeling. One day there is more ghee, another day maybe butter replaces it because guests are coming over. You cook once, for a meal, for a handful of people. You taste, you adjust, you improvise. Ingredients behave differently, moods shift, instinct takes over. The result is never identical, but the experience always lands.
Years later, I found myself holding another kind of recipe book, one that felt both familiar and completely new. It belonged to Chef Floyd Cardoz’s mum Aunty Beryl. This one was typed out, neat, structured. But at its core, it carried the same spirit as my mum’s notebook, personal, slightly cryptic, and rooted in lived experience.
At the time, I was working on opening O Pedro, and these recipes became my starting point. I had no real context for the cuisine. What the book gave me was a foundation, a way to understand what “correct” looked like before I could reinterpret it.
And then came the humbling part. I attempted a xacuti from her book. Followed it—or at least, I thought I did. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself the method didn’t make sense. The sequencing felt unfamiliar, the techniques didn’t align with what I had been taught. So, I did what I thought was right. I “fixed” it.
What I ended up with was a bright-red curry that looked and tasted completely off. I genuinely believed the recipe was flawed. Until I was told, very clearly, that it wasn’t.
The problem was not the recipe. It was me. I hadn’t understood how to read it. Goan cooking didn’t follow the rules I had learned, there was no predictable starting point of onions, ginger, garlic. Ingredients were treated differently. And instead of trusting that, I imposed my own method. The moment stayed with me.
Because it made me realise that recipes like these, whether handwritten in a notebook or typed out on a page, are not static instructions. They are living documents. They carry context, intuition, and trust. They ask you to pay attention, to respect where they come from, and sometimes, to unlearn what you think you know.
I still go back to my mum’s cookbook. Not for exact measurements or perfect replication, but for something far more valuable. A reminder that cooking was never meant to be exact, that “old-school wisdom” and home kitchen hacks often rival, and sometimes surpass, what is taught in professional kitchens.
Hussain Shahzad is the executive chef at Hunger Inc. Hospitality, the team behind Papa’s, The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro & Veronica’s.