Preserving Ancestral Recipes

A food storytelling workshop with London Migration Film Festival x Kishanth Javegar

I partnered with the iconic London Migrational Film Festival 2024 to host a sold-out food storytelling workshop: ‘Preserving Ancestral Recipes: Create A Storytelling Family Cookbook’.

‘Everything we eat tells a story. Food connects us to people, histories, and traditions, evoking powerful emotions and childhood memories.

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?

In the face of forced migration, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and the climate crisis. It's even more urgent that our stories are documented and live through our food.’

The event was sold out 3 times and I was joined by over 40 guests at the infamous Ritzy Cinema in London, where the guests were invited to explore their family’s culinary heritage, ask meaningful questions around how migration and colonialism might have shaped the food they ate growing up and learnt how to creatively preserve stories and traditions through their family’s recipes and the food that shaped their identity to create a family cookbook.

The food based storytelling workshop involved three parts: Theory, Practice and Community:

Theory - Kishanth showcased 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 received one of his ancestral recipe-cards.
Practice - All the guests were invited to write a brief story of their families migration patterns and document one family recipe by recalling through memory or by calling a family member.
Community - All guests brought one piece of food or ingredient and shared with the group a story of how this item connects to their sense of ‘Home’ and what it means to them and their family.
Kishanth also cooked 3 of his families ancestral recipes for all the guests to eat, therefore continually sharing and spreading his families migrational stories through the food that shaped them.

Kishanth’s Family Cookbook that traces their migration over the last two centuries across India, Sri Lanka and the Western world.

The evening started with a presentation by Kishanth focusing on how to archive and document your family’s histories and then guests were invited to write about their families migrational patterns and ancestral recipes.