Judith Devasahayam

Recipes inherited, borrowed, argued over, and brought back to the table through Anastasia Miari’s Mediterranea: Life-perfected Recipes from Grandmothers of the Mediterranean Paati was the beginning. Which is inconvenient, because I was only supposed to be planning a menu. But then one grandmother became many grandmothers, and suddenly I was thinking about carrots, pastry, chickpeas, harissa, stuffed vegetables, cocktails, family kitchens, inherited habits, and all the ways grandmothers have...

Growing up in a multicultural family has its pros and cons, but one thing I can say for sure is this: food is never just one thing. It is never only breakfast, or Christmas cake, or something made because people were hungry. Food becomes memory, proof, habit, inheritance. It becomes the thing that tells you where you come from, even when your family history is scattered across places, languages, and people who had to leave home to build one elsewhere. It also gives you a very long list of...

There are some memories you don’t know are still inside you until something ordinary pulls them out; a smell, sound, or the taste of something you haven’t had in years. The particular coldness of a drink, or the colour of a syrup. The strange, sudden accuracy with which the past returns and places you somewhere you had not planned to go. This happened to me recently while I was making a glass of grape soda. I had made a batch of Crowded Kitchen’s homemade grape soda syrup and kept it in Mum’s...