3 ideas
The Indian food most British people know is curry-house food, which is rich, heavy and uniform. Indian home cooking is a different cuisine: lighter, vegetable-led, regional, and built for everyday eating. Judging a food culture by its restaurant export mistakes a commercial adaptation for the domestic original.
The author's Gujarati family had already adapted their cooking in Uganda. Expelled in 1972, they rebuilt it again in rural Lincolnshire, where familiar ingredients were hard to find. The cuisine survived by substituting local produce while keeping its core techniques and flavour logic, so each migration left a new layer on the recipes rather than erasing them.
Family cooks work by eye, taste and memory rather than by measurement, so their knowledge disappears unless someone transcribes it. Turning it into written recipes means quantifying intuitive judgements and adjusting them for a different kitchen and different ingredients. The written recipe is therefore a translation that preserves the dish by changing its form.