Grandma’s recipes, from your kitchen to the ’gram

How an Instagram page is curatingregional home recipes from around India, recreating them as slick recipe videos that add glamour to household staples

For artist Aarushi Kumar seeing a favourite family recipe, her mother’s chicken tikka masala, being brought to life from scratch on the Instagram page ‘foodlooking_familyrecipes’ was an “amazing experience”. The artist, who divides her time between Jaipur and Goa had been missing her mother’s cooking, especially this signature dish, which is a must-have whenever she is home. “I am a Punjabi and food is a big deal; chicken tikka masala is my favourite. Though my mother is not on Instagram, she felt happy seeing that the making of it had been so beautiful,” says Aarushi. A short note on the dish and what it means to Aarushi along with the list of ingredients, accompanies the ‘making’ video. It makes the post personal, not only in this case, but for each of the home recipes shared on the page. Every week one or two recipes are posted on the page; the contributor can be a family member or a friend of the person behind the recipe. The page has been posting for close to a year, curating them from entries sent in from across the country. Rasam from Tamil Nadu, Indore’s Indori shahi shikanji, aloo poshto from West Bengal, raw mango fish curry from Kerala, shrikhand from Gujarat are among the 150-odd recipes that have been shared. “Rather than chef-driven content, we wanted to make it ‘democratic’— driven by everyday people,” says Ashraf Abbas, founder of Foodlooking, which maintains the page with a following of 14,000 plus.