In the 1980s, when I was seven- or eight-years-old, on Sundays my mother and I would watch reruns of the The French Chef or new seasons of Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pépin and Yan Can Cook on PBS. My mother, who immigrated from India to New Jersey in 1977 when she was only 23, made me quickly transcribe recipes as best I could (pre-DVR days) into a steno-style notebook that she kept in her "everything drawer."
In the narrow kitchen, where she only wore her softest cotton salwar khameezes—"I'm not comfortable cooking in pants," she said—we’d try our hands at everything we’d seen, from Julia Child’s "Vegetables the French Way" to Martin Yan’s cashew chicken. Some of our kitchen experiments, like chrysanthemum chicken, failed—often due to my inaccurate or sloppy transcription—but we reproduced many a classic, like an impeccable poulet rôti. These dishes sat side-by-side with whatever else my mother had prepared for dinner: warm roti, nutty dhal, homemade yogurt.
My mother used food television to expand her culinary knowledge of Western ingredients and technique, and to experience the exotic at a time when budgets were exceedingly tight. It also helped ease her assimilation into an entirely new culture. She channeled Child’s famous enthusiasm and mastered béchamel and how to déglacer and prepare a meal service à la russe, as she simultaneously acclimated to northeastern winters, navigated cross-cultural parenting, and returned to school for a degree in computer science.
With her discovery of Western techniques and new-to-her New World produce, such as broccoli and artichoke, as well as her indigenous knowledge of Indian cuisine, she cooked with incredible creativity and freedom. We ate Indian-influenced French classics like Indian-spiced ratatouille, heady with fenugreek, fennel, black mustard, nigella and cumin, and Italian-influenced Indian classics like oregano and basil chicken tikka served with a marinara-inspired chutney.
There were many missteps: she didn't understand the complexities of cheese until much later on (we once had processed cheese in lasagna) and she frequently substituted one herb for another—cilantro for sage, for example, only because she had the former in her backyard kitchen garden—and didn't consider how it might alter the flavors of the dish. She was very practical that way; she used ingredients on hand, or those on sale at our local supermarket, or those she bought in bulk at the Indian grocers. My favorite meals were her mish-mash holiday offerings: tandoori chicken and biryani stuffing on Thanksgiving and chocolate mirror glazed besan ladoo for Diwali.
Food television's Eurocentric cultural hierarchy didn't bother her. Although she occasionally watched South Asian chefs on television, she turned them on merely for entertainment, not instruction. She adored Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery, as well as Jaffrey’s guest appearances on various other PBS shows, but she didn't need to be "taught" how to make egg curry or aloo gobi.
Lack of representation of people of color in American food media bothered me more than her. The blatant cultural appropriation of cuisines by white chefs rankled me as I became an opinionated teenager, and I turned away from food television. "What is 'authenticity'?" she asked me when I rolled my eyes at Martha Stewart's salmon with "Indian spices." Unlike me, her American-born daughter, she saw Stewart's or Christopher Kimball's embrace of Indian-style flavors as something to celebrate. "They can't take your food away from you," she said.
When our family home was finally outfitted with cable and satellite television in the 1990s, she would switch over from Food Network and PBS to Zee TV, an Indian cable and satellite television channel, to watch Khana Khazana, a Hindi-language cooking show that was the first of its kind when it launched in 1993. The show's host, Sanjeev Kapoor, a slight man with a widow's peak and dimples, taught traditional and original Indian recipes, and my mother urged me to transcribe once again. Kapoor approximated her style of cooking, from steel cut oats seasoned with garam masala to tiki (croquettes) made of quinoa. She was inspired by his flair.
While Pépin and Child remained favorites, cable television, and later YouTube, introduced my mother to new personalities and styles of cooking. Ina Garten and Mario Batali ranked at the top of her list, but she gave Rachael Ray and Guy Fieri a pass. She wanted nothing to do with competitive cooking. "I learn nothing from Chopped," she said; she found The Next Food Network Star boring and Top Chef pretentious, despite my insistence that we watch to see a Brown woman as host. Later, I loved Aarti Sequeira's Aarti Party, because she most closely represented my food sensibilities on a large platform. My mother wasn't nearly as impressed; "I could do this!" she said.
Recently, she asked me to set up a food blog for her.
"No one reads blogs anymore, Mom," I said. "Launch a YouTube channel." We live in a multigenerational home and, these days, our food media consumption is frequently dictated by my five-year-old daughter, who prefers Nerdy Nummies or Cookies, Cupcakes, and Cardio on YouTube or The Great British Baking Show on Netflix and PBS.
Food television allowed my mother to acculturate to a new life and diet; my consumption of such media waxed and waned with my growing awareness as a person of color in America; my daughter now watches to learn the best way to make an Elena of Avalor birthday cake or mermaid tail cupcakes, which is a different sort of assimilation and acculturation, I suppose.
We three now settle down into the couch and I prop an iPad on my knees, and my daughter swipes to find a how-to video for "galaxy" buttercream. Like her grandmother, my strong-willed and creative daughter finds joy in cooking videos, and I think she will be a force in the kitchen one day. I place a steno-style notebook in my daughter's hands; she is just learning how to read and write. "Take down the recipe," says my mother. "We will make it together today!"
Watch Jacques Pepin expertly cut a lemon pig:
Thank you to writer Nandita Godbole for speaking with me about the immigrant experience and food television prior to my writing this piece.