Preserving Ancestral Recipes: Create a Storytelling Family Cookbook

Everything we eat tells a story, one of its people, histories and traditions. It creates a formidable bond with our senses and intertwines with our childhood memories, having the power to make us feel joy, nostalgia and sadness.

For children of diaspora, seeking to explore and understand their ancestry and cultures, food can become a trojan horse for connection and understanding migration.

How can we document and preserve our ancestral family recipes as heirlooms through creative mediums and ensure it is passed down through generations?

Join storyteller and filmmaker Kishanth Javegar at a workshop where he’ll show how he documented his Tamil family’s ancestral recipes by creating a family cookbook.

Discover practical tools and creative practices to explore your family’s culinary heritage, instigate meaningful questions and create your own family cookbook. Preserve stories and traditions from the kitchen through the food that shapes your identity.

The food based storytelling workshop will involve three parts:

• Kishanth will showcase how he created a Family Cookbook documenting his families Tamil recipes, to ensure it would be preserved and not lost through time and how he distributed it to everyone in his family as an ancestral heirloom. All guests will receive one of his ancestral recipe-cards.
• Invite all the guests to write a brief story of their families migration patterns and document one family recipe through Canva or on paper.
• Invite all guests to bring one piece of food or ingredient and share with the group a story of how this item connects to their sense of ‘Home’ and what it means to them and their family.

Workshop led and facilitated by Kishanth Javegar.

Guests should bring a laptop, notebook or drawing pad for the workshop.

Host or Publisher Migration Collective