No matter how close you are with your mother or daughter, the idea of teaming up to create a cookbook – and then taking your kitchen skills and putting them on display for a live audience – is not for the faint-hearted. So much of the cooking that Jayshri and Laxmi Ganda grew up with was taught by observing, rather than reading recipes – making it less accessible for younger generations or those just starting out to learn about the glorious flavours of Indian cuisine. They decided to change that by creating their own cookbook, A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That and now they want to show Christchurch how to make authentic Indian cuisine in person!
Like most kids, when Jayshri Ganda was young she had nothing but disinterest in the Gujarati meals her mother created in the family home. “I grew up in the 1980s, and there weren’t even Indian restaurants in New Zealand back then,” she laughs. It was only as she grew older that she realised the depth, complexity and sheer deliciousness that comes with Indian cuisine – and how skilled her mother was at making it. “I notice [that attitude] with my young nieces now – they’re not that interested, but as they get older, I know they’ll also want to start asking, ‘How did you learn how to do that? What was India like when you grew up there?’”
Jayshri, her mother Laxmi and I are all on a Zoom call, with the duo beaming in from their different homes in Christchurch. Their close-knit bond is easy to see, as is their very classic mother-daughter dynamic: finishing each other’s sentences, joking about how intense the process of creating their first cookbook together was.
The book, brilliantly titled A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That, was a runaway success and when I ask them if they’ve considered making a follow-up cookbook, Laxmi immediately jokes “not with me”. It was – understandably – a large enterprise, taking generations’ worth of family recipes, all of which had been passed down through observation, and committing them to paper. But what resulted was not only a living piece of family history, but an entry point into how to create some of the most delicious recipes on earth.
Making authentic Indian cuisine accessible for everyone was the aim of the Ganda family’s work – the creation of A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That was “hard and fast”, Jayshri says, with months on end of observing, writing down and then testing a range of recipes that had never been put to paper. This weekend, the pair will be taking their work on the road: at The Food Show in Christchurch, Jayshri and Laxmi will be cooking in front of a live audience.
“When I was a kid, I used to pretend I was in a cooking show, so it’s exciting in that way,” says Jayshri, as she mimes taking something out of the oven. “’Here’s one we prepared earlier!’” They’re making roti, samosa – the pastry, the filling, the whole process – and a masala chicken. Some of these are recipes Laxmi has been making for over 50 years – raised in the Gujarat area, she grew up in a small village where her parents ran a farm.
“When we came home from school, I would make roti and get it ready so that when the farmers turned up, we would have it ready for them,” Laxmi recalls. “We didn’t have tables or chairs, so we all just sat on the floor. We cooked them on an open flame – we didn’t have electricity or gas.”
Laxmi’s cooking skills were honed over the years after watching her mother and her parents-in-law cooking, as well as recipes from friends. It was all mostly done through either word of mouth or observing the process, rather than from reading a recipe book. “We would just make the recipe up or watch someone do it, then put it together a few times,” she says, before laughing. “Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.”
When it came to writing these processes down, Jayshri and Laxmi went through eight months of multiple rounds of cooking the recipes together, with Laxmi writing down steps as they went. It was, as you might imagine, a recipe for hilarity, trying to capture the innate knowledge of Laxmi’s years of cooking down on paper. “Mum would have a couple of pots on the stove and then I’d be like ‘Mum, are you timing these?’ and she was like, ‘No!!??’ I said ‘We have to time all of this, otherwise how are people going to know if it’s cooked?’” Jayshri laughs. “’Mum said, ‘When the potatoes are done, they’re done!”’
The cuisine of India has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to cooking sustainably, having a multitude of meat-free dishes and using spices, rather than fat, to create flavour – basically, everything that the modern-day mainstream diet is now looking towards. But when the Ganda family first moved to Christchurch, there wasn’t the range of Indian ingredients available in New Zealand that there is now and they still had to ship “boxes and boxes” of spices down from Auckland.
These days, it’s a far more celebrated and widely appreciated cuisine in New Zealand but even in saying that, both Jayshri and Laxmi were blown away by how popular their cookbook was on its release.
“Mum was concerned, given the quantity we’d ordered, that we wouldn’t sell them all but I had an intuition or gut feeling inside myself, knowing how many people needed it.” It wasn’t just people who had grown up with Indian cooking and were thrilled to finally have written down versions of family recipes, there were also a huge number of people who had married into Gujarati families and wanted to learn how to cook for their partners and in-laws. Food, as always had the power to bring people together.
“That’s what we often do in Christchurch – when there are big sports events or weddings, that’s what the Indian community does – they bring in the large curries and feed big quantities to people!” Jayshri says.
Jayshri and Laxmi Ganda will be running the cooking presentation ‘Authentic Indian Inspiration’ at the Christchurch Food Show, this Sunday 11 April. For more information on The Food Show, visit here. For more information on their cookbook, visit here
