Profile | The Indian start-up helping preserve family heirloom recipes ‘before it’s too late’, by enabling people to publish them in bespoke cookbooks
- Shruti Taneja, the Delhi-based founder of Nivaala, was inspired to start helping people record their ‘family food culture’ after missing her late mother’s food
- The project has evolved from selling blank journals to tailor-made cookbooks containing families’ and other recipes that can be passed down through generations
“Food that is cooked by our mothers and grandmothers is not just nourishment, it’s a repository of family food culture and nostalgia and a legacy that we need to hold on to,” says Shruti Taneja, the 35-year-old founder of Nivaala, a platform dedicated to celebrating culinary legacies.
Taneja, who is based in Delhi, India, started Nivaala (which means “morsel” in Hindi) to preserve and archive family recipes – some oral and others recorded in smudged notebooks stained with spices and relegated to a forgotten shelf.
“It is the most tangible way to connect with your roots and heritage, and provides solace and comfort,” says Taneja, whose childhood was defined by the omnipresence of food.
It wasn’t until her mother died that she felt the importance of having recipes for the comfort food that she was so used to – dishes she had taken for granted.
Unfortunately, she had not written down or learned any of her family recipes.
“Around the same time, my nephew was born and I realised that he would never get to taste the same food that me and my brother had grown up eating,” she says.
