‘Then, of course, you add turmeric and chilli powder’How WhatsApp voice notes revolutionised recipe transmission in South Asia. Words by Maryam Jillani. Illustration by Krutika Susarla. Plus voice notes in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, and English.
In 2023, I kicked off research for my first cookbook, Pakistan. In an effort to capture the breadth of Pakistani food, I travelled to over a dozen villages, towns and cities across the country’s four provinces and Northern Areas to source recipes from home-cooks and restaurants. During that trip, I spent a few days in Quetta (the provincial capital of the western province, Balochistan). After watching me frantically move through a short but packed itinerary to source recipes, Saifullah – who was assigned by my host to drive me – invited me over to his village, so that his wife and sister could cook for me. When I couldn’t make the time, Saifullah brought me a Tupperware stuffed with qurut baingan – fried eggplant with dried cheese – that his sister had prepared. Deeply flavoured, with a hint of tartness, it was the most delicious eggplant dish I ate during that trip. Later that night, I sent Saifullah a voice note, asking him how his sister made the dish. ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ he responded in Urdu, ‘You fry the eggplant, then some onions and tomatoes, add a little bit of masala. Mix it in, and top it with some qurut [dried cheese].’ I didn’t know it then, but WhatsApp voice notes would end up being a lifeline that kept me connected to the recipes I found long after I returned home to Manila, where I now live. Here, I would often hash out the intricacies of a recipe not through phone calls or texts, but over voice notes.
South Asians are some of WhatsApp’s most avid customers. As of June 2024, the app had nearly three billion active users, of which nearly 854 million reside in India and 52 million are based in Pakistan. ‘It’s the primary source of communication [in Pakistan],’ Ramsha Jahangir, a journalist and policy expert focused on technology tells me. She gives examples of where WhatsApp is used in social life in Pakistan: blood donation drives, village-based community initiatives in rural Sindh, and even the bakra mandi (sale of goats) organised every Eid ul Azha. ‘My family was talking to a vendor on WhatsApp who was describing the bakra, the age and the breed, over audio clips. ‘There’s not a single market that doesn’t exist on WhatsApp,’ Jahangir says. In 2013, WhatsApp launched voice notes, which allows users to record and send short audio messages; in 2022, WhatsApp reported that nearly 7 billion voice notes are sent every day. Reporting in the US suggests that the recent popularity of voice notes is a post-Covid or Gen Z phenomenon, but in India, where there are over 120 regional languages, or in Pakistan, where literacy rates continue to hover at 58 per cent, voice notes have unsurprisingly become a routine part of daily life. ‘For journalists in Pakistan, it [the voice note] doesn’t require literacy. So you end up using them a lot,’ culture writer Ahmer Naqvi tells me. ‘When I first started working in cricket [as a reporter, a few years ago] I realised everybody sends voice notes. Nobody sends texts.’ Now, after moving to Toronto, Naqvi also uses voice notes to source his favorite recipes from his mother. Like me, he realised that the majority of the cooks in Pakistan find it easier to transmit recipes over the phone or through a voice note than writing them over text.
There is an air of informality within a voice note, relieving the sender of the burden of retrofitting the presumably amorphous, creative act of cooking into a rigid recipe format. The voice note instead transfers the onus to the receiver, who must interpret and apply the instructions based on their own experience and instincts. Farah Yameen, a Cambridge-based researcher, tells me that, while interviewing nearly a hundred women in Delhi, many said the same thing when asked about how they learned to cook a dish. ‘There was no formal passing of a recipe,’ Yameen remembers, ‘people just saying, I watched my mother do something … they imbibed the recipe through presence.’ This process is what imparts ‘andaza,’, which translates to or ‘estimate’ but is also understood as a ‘sense.’ Food writer Sumayya Usmani, in her memoir of the same name, describes andaza as a ‘feeling in your hands.’ In her first cookbook, American culinary anthropologist and food writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor called it ‘vibration cooking’.
This is not to say that South Asian cuisines have never documented through the written word. Early examples include dharma literature (composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE), and what historian Colleen Taylor Sen refers to as the first Indian cookbook – Pakasastra (The Science of Cooking) by the mythical Nala, the king of Nishada. But according to Mumbai-based culinary anthropologist Kurush Dalal, the description of techniques in these early texts is often vague. ‘Even if a recipe was written down, there was no description of technique. It had a name and a list of ingredients,’ Dalal explains. ‘Very rarely would they tell you what to do with the ingredients.’ After the arrival of the British in India, the subcontinent saw cookbooks written by British women settlers, such as Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables or the Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook). This was followed by an escalation of cookbooks written in the modern recipe format, particularly in regions where there was a strong British presence, like Bengal. However, given that literacy rates among women were extremely low during this period, the majority of women continued to learn through observation in their family kitchens. Even when literacy rates among women improved – in India more than in Pakistan – and the modern recipe format took root following independence from the British, the practice of writing recipes down remained largely confined to members of the English-speaking elite, says Calcutta-based corporate lawyer and food scholar Sanhita Dasgupta Sensarma. ‘Educated women [from] the privileged classes would write down recipes, subscribe to foreign publications or come up with recipe columns. For example, my mother would subscribe to a Soviet magazine that was translated in India. Other friends would subscribe to [magazines like] Femina,’ Sensarma explains.
Dominant-caste, ethnic and linguistic majorities are often over-represented in print, television and digital media in the sub-continent. In Pakistan, for instance, most of the recipes archived through cookbooks, women’s magazines or television come from dominant-class Punjabi or Urdu-speaking women from the country’s major urban centres, such as Shireen Anwar or Zubaida Tariq. In India, there was a dearth of written documentation of food from the North-Eastern states and cuisines from marginalised communities, until the publication of books like Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada by Shahu Patole (which has now been translated into English) and The Essential North-East Cookbook by Hoihnu Hauzel. While the proliferation of community cookbooks has partially helped stymy the homogenisation of Indian cuisine in print, their influence remains limited in scale – especially when compared to recipe exchanges over the phone. Both India and Pakistan experience high rates of domestic and international migration: India has the largest global diaspora in the world, while Pakistan ranks seventh. The long-standing trend of individuals, across classes, leaving their home to seek work both in and out of the country means that the traditional methods of learning to cook – observing, listening and tasting in your family kitchen – become less accessible, so many frequently turn to the phone and, increasingly, voice notes. Soon, WhatsApp may end up becoming the largest repository of vernacular South Asian culinary knowledge in existence.
Marium Hosein, a popular Pakistani–American content creator based in New Orleans, would frequently call her grandmother in order to learn classic Punjabi dishes she was craving when she moved to the US thirteen years ago. Hosein’s old system of international calling – Alibaba calling cards – was a massive hassle, and with WhatsApp, Hosein’s nani could call all her grandchildren directly with great ease. Over time, Hosein and her grandmother began to communicate and share recipes via voice notes, but Hosein described these more as ‘templates’ she could build from, rather than complete recipes. Naqvi feels that you need a high base knowledge of cooking before you can learn to cook a dish using a voice note. ‘Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to use these voice notes as recipes,’ Naqvi says about his mother’s examples. ‘There are no quantities. There are certain steps she expects that I understand, and then those classic “then, of course, you add haldi, mirchi” instructions’. Like Hosein, Naqvi treats the voice notes like a ‘template’ – a list of ingredients, and a rough idea of the process – that can then, based on the recipient’s instinct, skills and knowledge – be used to recreate the dish. When I was researching my book, I reached out to Maria Ajmerwala, the founder and chef behind the Karachi-based supper club Bohra Dastarkhwan, for the recipe of her punchy tamarind imli ka sharbat. Ajmerwala is a trained chef and is well-versed in following and writing a precise modern recipe, but for the sharbat she sent a voice note that gave me a loose idea of the process, leaving me to figure out the rest. ‘I don’t have a written recipe,’ she begins. ‘Soak imli (tamarind) with seeds for a couple of hours; just boil it with a pinch of red chilli powder. When it becomes soft, discard the seeds. Then, take a block of gurh, soak it, and then you will have gurh ka pani (jaggery water). Then, just put two–three spoons of tamarind. No measurements. Keep tasting it until it tastes right.’
In her voice note, Ajmerwala had given me the template of her recipe for imli ka sharbat. It was now up to me to distil it into a replicable recipe, complete with precise measurements, times, and clear visual cues. While the recipe that made it into my book will allow the reader – either a novice cook or somebody new to South Asian cuisine – to recreate the drink (albeit with the influence of my own palate, undoubtedly), it took away Ajmerwala’s gentle nudge to play with the recipe: ‘If you want more sour, then add more tamarind pulp. If you want more sweet, then add more gurh ka pani … It’s very subjective,’ she said. In 2023, Karachi-based artist Fazal Rizvi began a series called The Table, a gathering where different collaborators – artists, photographers and writers, for example – can share, eat and prepare, talk about and through food, food politics and food rituals. In The Table’s first iteration, Rizvi wanted to examine the format of the recipe and recipe-writing. He presented a translation of a voice note his mother sent him while he was in the Netherlands which told him how to make machli ka salan, a fish curry from his mother’s kitchen. In the translation, Rizvi describes his mother’s voice note as an intimate and dynamic interplay between giver and receiver. He admits to its deviation from the modern recipe’s promise of precision. An excerpt from his translation reads:
In the end, I was never able to recreate Saifullah’s sister’s recipe for eggplant, and could not include the recipe in my book. But every time I miss Pakistan, I listen to his voice note.
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