Archana Pidathala’s ‘Five Morsels Of Love’ Defies The Flattening Of Indian Culinary Art

In many parts of India, where several generations and branches of a family still live in a shared ancestral home, it is not uncommon for grandmothers to feed younger children of the family by making small morsels of a meal. This intimate, maternal act of childcare, of feeding, of providing sustenance as an outward expression of love is as much a part of Indian cultures as spices and aromatics. Archana Pidathala's maternal grandmother, G Nirmala Reddy did much the same with her grandchildren. Only — she was an extraordinary home cook and the author of 'Vanita Vantakālu', a self-published Telugu cookbook which sold out twice over.

Archana Pidathala's own critically acclaimed cookbook, 'Five Morsels Of Love' is a spiritual successor to her grandmother's Telugu magnum opus. Drawing from her grandmother's manuscripts, handwritten notes, and Pidathala's childhood memories, Five Morsels Of Love is an archive of over one hundred heirloom recipes from Andhra cuisine. But it is also so much more than a collection of recipes. It is, at once, a memoir and an ethnographic body of work that extends far beyond culinary instruction to explore food as a metaphor for memory, identity, cultural heritage, and inheritance.

The original book, Vanita Vantakālu, written in 1975, was intended for skilled home cooks familiar with the specific rhythms of an Andhra kitchen, Pidathala says.

"My grandmother had an advanced cook in mind, someone who had enough knowledge to navigate an Andhra kitchen, the spices, and the basic techniques of Andhra cooking," Pidathala says.

However, when she inherited her grandmother's extended draft of the book and her handwritten notes in 2007 — the year her grandmother passed away — she didn't know how to cook. Yet, despite her inexperience, Pidathala felt compelled to finish what her grandmother had started. "I had some blind faith to complete the work she had begun, which was a translation of the original book into English," she says.

Learning to cook from the original Telugu text became a deeply personal and often challenging process for Pidathala. "As I taught myself to cook from her original book, it took me a very long time because I had to start from the very beginning," she says. The experience shaped the tone and structure of Five Morsels of Love.

"The recipes in Five Morsels are a bit more detailed," Pidathala explains. "The recipes do not assume any prior knowledge of cooking. They don't assume that you are familiar with an Andhra kitchen, with the ingredients in an Andhra kitchen — mostly because I was teaching myself and I kind of wrote it; I kind of was translating her voice for a beginner cook. And that was me to begin with. The audience was really just me."

It was a painstaking and time-consuming process. While the published version of Vanita Vantakālu included approximately 120 recipes, Nirmala Reddy — Pidathala's grandmother — also left behind an extended draft with over 300 recipes and several boxes of handwritten notes. "There was a lot," Pidathala says. From this wealth of heirloom recipes, Pidathala selected only the recipes that resonated with her. "I picked 50 of the recipes which I was most familiar with. Food I grew up on, food I remember very well, and food that means something to me."

As she reflected more on her childhood, the project expanded and took on a new shape. "I realized there were more recipes that she cooked for me and my family when I was a little child. I wanted to keep Five Morsels focused around recipes that define a meal for us as a family. Recipes I remember, recipes my brother and my three cousins remember, and recipes my mom remembers," Pidathala says.

Some recipes, left out of her grandmother's book for being too simple, found a place in hers. "For instance, the first recipe in Five Morsels, which is Gongura Pappu, is not present in the original book perhaps because she thought it's too everyday — Pappu is something we make all the time. But because Gongura has such significance in Andhra cooking, and Pappu is something we eat at every meal, I decided to bring it back into Five Morsels."

The result of this approach — which took almost a decade to complete — was a body of work that resists the flattening of Andhra cuisine under the broader umbrella of South Indian food.

"I think that's a problem with many cuisines in India because we have so many micro cuisines," Pidathala says. For her, the idea of a unified Andhra cuisine obscures deep regional and hyperlocal differences.

"I'm not even talking about Andhra food because coastal Andhra is very different from inland Andhra, where I come from," Pidathala says. "The landscape is different. The terrain is different. The geography is different. What we grow is different. We don't have access to fresh seafood. It's a very dry, arid, desert-like region. So Andhra itself is a million micro cuisines."

This ecological specificity translates into hyper-local foodways that shift from town to town, street to street, household to household. When Pidathala included an eggplant and yam stir-fry called Kanda Vepudu in Five Morsels, a friend from her neighbourhood admitted she wasn't familiar with the dish. The lesson was clear to Pidathala: there was no monolithic Indian cuisine, or even Andhra cuisine. Yet, mainstream representations of Indian cuisine continue to obscure these nuances.

In Five Morsels Of Love, Pidathala put the hyperlocal cuisine of her home region of Rayalaseema, in southern Andhra Pradesh, front and centre. Despite the broader cultural questions the book has raised, it began from a deeply personal impulse, not an academic or archival one. "I did not approach this as a way to preserve a cuisine," she says. "I started the project purely out of this intention of honouring my grandmother's memory, to keep her alive for myself, to think about her every day. That was my only motivation."

Still, Five Morsels found resonance far beyond Pidathala's expectations. "When the book came out and it resonated with people all over the world, not necessarily in Rayalaseema, not necessarily in Andhra, not necessarily in South India."

This deeply personal origin of the book is central to understanding how Five Morsels stands within a new canon in Indian food writing. Its timing was strangely perfect. The book launched just as a new generation of Indian food writers rejected the ornamental, nostalgic tone of conventional food literature. Instead, they turned towards memoir, oral history, ethnography, and activism — approaching food as a complex, many-layered metaphor for memory, identity, and the politics of erasure.

Pidathala, too, is keenly aware of this. "India being what it is, we have the caste system," she says. "The caste hierarchies and the food that emerges or that lives in these hierarchies and what gets celebrated and what doesn't — I think these are some very big questions that the food media and the food writers in India need to be asking ourselves."

Although Five Morsels Of Love does not directly address these issues, the book draws its power from the tension between the seen and the unseen, the valued and the unvalued, the public and the private. The book is built on love, but it also probes the invisible emotional and domestic labour of women, especially within the kitchen. Pidathala reflects on how her grandmother, who wrote and catalogued hundreds of recipes, would never have been called a historian.

"I don't think anybody would call her an archivist or a documentarian or somebody who documented life of a particular time, which I think is a very, very important contribution to documenting history," Pidathala says.

Of course, there's a personal cost to this erasure of women's work, this social and cultural amnesia about women's contributions to culture-making. Growing up, Pidathala was encouraged to stay out of the kitchen. Her grandmother, like many women of her generation, believed success lay in academic and professional achievements beyond the domestic sphere. "Somehow the world outside is more valued," Pidathala says. "I did most of what she expected me to do. I did go to an engineering school. I went to one of the best business schools in the country. I worked in a job that was deeply satisfying and financially healthy for a long time."

But while writing Five Morsels Of Love, she returned to the kitchen and found herself reclaiming a space once left behind. This reclamation is not without its critics. Pidathala says that people often ask her if she's overqualified to be writing cookbooks. The implication is clear: food writing, especially when domestic and female, is somehow less than. "I'm challenging that every day," she says. "I'm challenging the idea that being overqualified means I don't belong in a kitchen."

And in doing so, she invites us to do the same.

"Reclaiming that space and that narrative," Pidathala says, "for myself and for my grandmother and for millions of women is, I think, something I'm trying to challenge in my own small way every day."

Grab your copy of 'Five Morsels of Love' here.

Follow Archana Pidathala here.

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