The Cookbook That Helped Me After a Divorce (2024)

During the early stretches of the pandemic, when the rest of the world was preoccupied with sourdough starters, dalgona coffees and ways to use up the dozens of eggs they’d hoarded from Instacart, I fished a neglected cookbook out of a box and set it on my counter. With a recipe for “Hot Water Pastry (Very Quick and Easy)” on Page 198 of the esteemed “Indian Delights” open before me, I struggled to coax a mound of dough into gossamer wisps of pastry shell. As I pummeled the dough into submission, a dusting of flour settled on the book. I’m no baker, as evidenced by the water bottle I commandeered as a rolling pin. There was a brand-new package of pastry dough sitting in my freezer, just within reach, and yet my chalky onslaught continued.

“Indian Delights” has been considered the definitive directory of South African Indian cookery for six decades, an essential text for any respectable South African Indian housewife. I’m hardly the target demographic: I live in New York, and I’m not a South African housewife — though I suppose I could have been in another life. A decade ago, during a foray into marriage with a South African Indian man, I received several copies of “Indian Delights” as wedding presents soon after moving from New York to Cape Town. For a newly arrived Indian American bride, this unsolicited cookbook haul felt less like a gift than a bunch of presumptions; they sat untouched on a shelf for the duration of my four-year marriage.

My ex-husband and I eventually separated. I returned to New York, and one copy of “Indian Delights” came back with me, languishing in that box for years until I unearthed it in a lockdown-induced cleaning frenzy. It had been signed by its venerable editor, Zuleikha Mayat.

Mayat, who died in February at age 97, stood out among the aunties I met through my former in-laws over the years. A journalist and anti-apartheid activist, Mayat was a founding member of the Women’s Cultural Group in Durban and occasionally sheltered Nelson Mandela during the years he spent in hiding. She edited a cookbook that doubles as a seminal anthropological survey, braided with historical notes and folk tales that shed light on the quirks of a diasporic Indian culture that exists only in South Africa. As an Indian American who grew up with strong ties to India, I always marveled at how different South African Indians seemed from India-Indians, the inevitable result of more than 150 years of separation from the motherland and of a community that evolved under oppressive conditions of apartheid and indentured labor. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the cuisine: “The confidence of the Indian housewife in her skill as a cook allowed her to improvise whenever a basic ingredient was not available,” the book explains. The result is a distinctly South African version of Indian cookery.

Thumbing through recipes for quince curries, mealie puddings and koeksisters is a study in culinary cartography. Indian dishes have been adapted with ingredients indigenous to South Africa, like snoek (a kind of mackerel) and madumbi (a regional variety of root vegetable), that would surely confound a home cook in Delhi or Hyderabad. The flavor profiles are predominantly Indian, to be sure — red chile, cumin, coriander, fenugreek and turmeric are tossed around liberally in these pages. Much like South African Indian culture itself, these recipes weave in European, Malay and African elements.

When dissolving a marriage, you’re often too busy trading barbs to swap recipes on your way out the door. Amid my grief, it never occurred to me to ask for the steps to a former relative’s green bean casserole, an ex-cousin-in-law’s avocado-custard dessert or a onetime friend’s khowse. I didn’t realize how much I would someday come to miss the puri patta packed as snacks for road trips, the greasy bunny chows at nondescript takeaway joints in Durban, the ostrich burgers flipped on the grill and, more than anything, the heaping platters of savouries, or pastries, that had come to define each year’s Ramadan. But once the dust settled and the healing began, so did the cravings. My culinary vernacular may have expanded during my South African stint, but even if I wanted to update my repertoire with these new favorites, I didn’t know where to begin.