Hot Off the Shelf: Khabaar by Madhushree Ghosh

[image description: The book cover for Khabaar, which is a photo of a wooden tabletop with a red cloth napkin and blue ceramic mug of chai (milky tea).]
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review and I honestly loved it! If you’d like to buy a copy for yourself, there’s an affiliate link at the bottom of the post.

I’m a terrible cook myself, but I sure love to eat and if given the choice I’ll pretty much always pick Mediterranean food.

This isn’t merely a flavor preference, but a deep cultural connection as well. I’m half Palestinian and my Pali grandma died when I was 12, taking her head full of memorized recipes that she learned to cook in Ramallah to the grave. She preferred to shoo me out of the kitchen since it was small and she usually had several dishes going at once, but not begging her to write the recipes down or teach me to cook before she died is one of the great regrets of my life.

Nowadays, my main connection to Palestinian culture is through food and I’m always on the hunt for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean restaurants that might have some of the foods I grew up eating. This is to say that I understand the tight knot that food and culture form and would argue that one is inextricable from the other.

That’s why I was so excited to get my hands on a copy of Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family by Madhushree Ghosh. Though we come from vastly different families, food traditions, and cultures, I love hearing about the ways that food is a vital touchpoint for immigrants and children of immigrants.

First, the synopsis:

Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what does belonging in a new place look like in the foods carried over from the old country? These questions are integral to the author’s own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what’s now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents’ memory alive through her Bengali food.

Confession: While I’ve had north and south Indian food, I’m not sure that I’ve had Bengali food specifically. After reading Khabaar, I definitely want to try some! You expect scrumptious descriptions of food in a food memoir but Madhushree has a gift for describing taste in a way that helps you imagine what the food would taste like, even if you’ve never actually had it. There are recipes and photos throughout the book, so if you’re feeling up to the task you can try to make some of the dishes at home.

So, yes, there’s a practical side for folks who love to cook. But I said I’m a terrible cook, remember? What’s in it for me? Turns out, a lot! There were several reasons why I couldn’t put Khabaar down.

While Khabaar contains recipes, it’s not a cookbook––it’s a food memoir. Madhushree drew me in with descriptions of the village where she grew up, Chittaranjan Park in India. We meet her parents and sister, then later her aunts and cousins, as we learn about what life was like for the family which was originally from Bangladesh and came to India as refugees. With the family dynamics and the setting so beautifully established, you can better appreciate the stories of going to the local outdoor market and the many characters who populate the food stalls. Through these tales, you learn how to identify a good fish and about the feud between a food stall owner who retired and sold the stall, then promptly came out of retirement and returned as competition.

One of the things I most appreciated about Khabaar was that it wasn’t a food memoir about the trials and tribulations of running a restaurant. I’ve read and enjoyed several of those, but there are only so many times I can read about chefs working their way up from a kitchen where they were mistreated to opening their own restaurant, and how afterward all their relationships suffered because of the long hours they were forced to put in. I don’t mean to demean these stories or imply that they’re not important and don’t have a place in food literature, only that I’ve seen this common theme in several food memoirs I’ve read and it’s no longer interesting to me personally.

Madhushree’s relationship to food is one I can more readily relate to. She doesn’t currently and has never owned a restaurant, so she seeks the food connections to her culture through others, like the food stalls, restaurants she frequents, and in her own kitchen. In a way, finding the flavors she craves is like a treasure hunt and that’s far more interesting to me than restaurant mechanics.

While there are so many beautiful and happy connections between food and culture, that’s not always the case. Through her stories of food, we also learn about the struggles of being in an abusive marriage, grief over the loss of her parents, the challenges of being a woman of color in science, and how the assassination of India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi in her childhood rocked Madhushree’s world. Every essay is raw and honest without being sentimental; thus, she conveys these events in an emotionally compelling way without the essays feeling overly depressing.

In the past, I’ve read some food memoirs where food is treated as though it’s purely a balm or a solution to all the author’s problems. While that’s often the case, hence the reason for the deep emotional connection to food, it’s not always the case. Madhushree doesn’t pretend that cooking for her abusive husband and his ungrateful parents made the relationship better, nor does she pretend that her aunt making desserts made her feel better about learning of her cousin’s suicide. While food is the pole around which all the stories revolve, it’s not the be-all-end-all, which I think makes Khabaar more honest than any other food memoir I’ve ever read.

While I loved the content, I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on the form the essays took. As a writer, I know there are a million ways to tell a story and sometimes chronological stories are the most boring and ineffective way. Most of the essays in Khabaar are braided essays––meaning that several stories are being told at once and the sections are separated by something like three asterisks, which denote a new section. This is an excellent form for stories where multiple disparate things are happening that will eventually converge around a common theme.

For example, in the chapter where Indira Gandhi was assassinated, the essay alternates between historical facts and news coverage from that time, child Madhushree’s reactions to her family and community’s response to the assassination, and present-day Madhushree’s favorite restaurant. Braided essays are a form that, when done as well as Madhushree’s, I could read endlessly.

(As I write this, I remember that I chose the braided essay form for one of my own food and culture essays, “Grape Leaves,” which was published in The Rumpus in 2018. The form does seem to lend itself particularly well to this type of writing. Come to think of it, nearly all of my essays about my family, Palestinian and otherwise, are braided… Perhaps I’ll unpack this in another blog post. But I digress.)

I feel like I’ve spent a good portion of this review measuring Khabaar against other food memoirs I’ve read in the past, but I think that’s the nature of literary criticism, of which book reviews are one type. However, I think it’s worth mentioning for this reason: In nearly every other food memoir I’ve read, there’s always something that I wish the author had spent more time talking about (like a particularly interesting point that was glossed over) or less time talking about (the tedium of commercial kitchens). I didn’t feel that way at all about Khabaar––there’s nothing at all I’d change.

I truly loved Khabaar and have been recommending it to all the food enthusiasts in my life (so many people I love are food photographers, recipe developers, and food bloggers). I think you’ll love it too and if you’d like a copy for yourself, I’d be grateful if you purchased using my Bookshop link below. Bookshop is an Amazon alternative that supports indie bookstores and blogs like mine.