For almost ten years, Sana Javeri Kadri has traveled throughout India and Sri Lanka during harvest season, visiting small farms that supply her spice business, Diaspora Spice Co. This company operates between the US and India, focusing on the South Asian community worldwide. During her visits, Kadri has enjoyed home-cooked meals and family recipes from farmers, which showcase the beauty of the spices beyond their origin.
In her new book, The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook, written with recipe developer Asha Loupy, Kadri shares over 100 authentic recipes that are often missing from typical cookbooks. These recipes come from farmers in regions like Maharashtra, Kerala, and Manipur. The team spent a year in a test kitchen in California, perfecting each recipe. They aimed to adapt them for a global audience, ensuring that the flavors were preserved while making them accessible for home cooks, even those far removed from the source of the spices.
Kadri emphasizes that the goal of the book is not just to be another cookbook from America. “It celebrates the 40 women who grow, harvest, and cook with their spices,” she explains. Each recipe is rooted in their traditions and techniques.
In a recent conversation, Kadri discussed the challenges of turning regional recipes into practical dishes for Indian diaspora kitchens. She recalled how she and Asha often found themselves encouraging their farm partners to use measuring tools, but many preferred to rely on intuition and memory. This meant that after returning to California, they had to retest the recipes numerous times to get the measurements just right.
Each dish went through multiple rounds of testing, adapting traditional cooking methods to fit common equipment used in American kitchens. For example, while farm kitchens lacked ovens, many American homes have them. Thus, Kadri and her team tailored their methods to ensure anyone could recreate these delicious dishes.
With her book, Kadri aspires to bring the hidden stories of Indian spices and their growers to light, making it easier for home cooks to connect with these rich culinary traditions.
