A Memoir of Memory, Migration, and the Making of a Kitchen
Announcing The Inheritance of Taste
In an age where food is often reduced to quick recipes and fleeting trends, The Inheritance of Taste arrives as something far more enduring—a deeply personal narrative where food becomes memory, identity, and inheritance.
Written by Nishi Pulugurtha, the book traces the remarkable journey of her mother, Tayaru Pulugurtha, who arrived in Calcutta as a Telugu bride in 1969, having never cooked a single meal. What followed was not merely the learning of recipes, but the slow, determined creation of a kitchen that would come to anchor a family navigating distance, language, and cultural difference.
Set against the backdrop of a changing city, the book begins in a modest bachelor’s kitchen in North Calcutta—an unfamiliar, even intimidating space for a woman stepping into an entirely new life. Through quiet resolve and persistence, Tayaru transformed that space into something far greater: a site of belonging. Each dish she learned to cook became a small act of adaptation, each ingredient sourced a bridge between Andhra Pradesh and Bengal.
But The Inheritance of Taste is not simply a culinary chronicle. It is a layered narrative that weaves together memoir, cultural history, and archive. Recipes are interspersed with anecdotes—of inland letters carrying handwritten instructions, of treasured cookbooks collected over decades, of improvised substitutions when ingredients were hard to find. The kitchen emerges not just as a physical space, but as a living repository of memory and migration.
At its heart, the book is also a tribute shaped by loss. Written in the shadow of Alzheimer’s disease, it captures the fragile, shifting nature of memory itself. As Tayaru’s tastes changed and familiar flavours faded, the act of recording recipes became an act of preservation—of holding on. Each story, each dish, becomes a way of keeping a life present.
The narrative extends beyond one woman’s journey to reflect on a broader experience: that of families who build new homes far from where they began. It explores how food carries language when words fail, how it sustains identity across generations, and how it quietly absorbs the influences of new geographies.
Structured into thoughtfully curated sections, the book pairs every recipe with a personal memory, inviting readers into the intimate world of the Pulugurtha family. From the early struggles of sourcing a grinding stone to the joy of packed lunchboxes remembered decades later, these moments form a rich tapestry of everyday life.
Mrs Tayaru Pulugurtha & Mr Hari Pulugurtha
The Inheritance of Taste is, ultimately, a story about what we carry forward—flavours, traditions, resilience, and love. It is for anyone who has ever found home in an unfamiliar place, and for those who understand that the simplest meals often hold the most profound stories.
This is not just a cookbook. It is a legacy, lovingly assembled—one recipe, one memory at a time.
Coming soon on Readomania!
About the Author
Nishi Pulugurtha is an academic, author, poet, editor and translator. She is Head and Associate Professor in English at Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College, Kolkata, with several academic publications. Her publications include a collection of travel essays, Out in the Open; an edited volume of essays on travel, Across and Beyond; three volumes of poems, The Real and the Unreal and Other Poems, Raindrops on the Periwinkle, Looking; a co-edited volume of poems Voices and Vision: The First IPPL Anthology, two collections of short stories The Window Sill and Framed; an edited anthology of short stories The Virasat Anthology of Short Stories; an edited volume of critical essays, Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence; a volume of essays written during the pandemic, Lockdown Times and a co-edited volume of translated short stories from Indian languages, Bandaged Moments. She has been a Writer in Residence, at Samyukta Research Foundation, Thiruvananthapuram. She is the Secretary of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, Kolkata, Advisory Board Member of Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India, Calcutta Chapter and was Chief Editor of Antonym Magazine for 2025.
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