Melodies from my kitchen is a collection of vegetarian Andhra recipes by Komala Sista Rao. These recipes carry with them the creativity, labour and love of generations of women in the author’s family, finely crafted and perfected over the years.
What’s Cookin’?
What will you do, when your mother is a sublime cook and she always wanted to make a collection of the heirloom recipes? You’ll make it happen and gift it for her birthday, of course. Aarti Rao-Shetty, Narasimha Rao and their siblings had the same idea and asked me if I would help them put this book together. This is how we did it.
First Taste
I started by familiarising myself with the recipes, figuring out a rough overall structure for the book and sketching possible layout directions. Arati and Narasimha had most of the recipes ready and they were working on getting the remaining recipes ready.
Popcorn on a Skillet
From the full recipe list, around 30 were picked for the shoot. We planned the shoot for 4 days, with an extra day as backup. We started around 9 in the morning, with photography equipments and cooking preparations setup in the same space, shooting till 10–11 in the night and having the same food once the shoot was done.
Cook to Perfection
After a quick round of shot selection and feedback, I started editing the photos and developing the recipe page layouts. Test prints were made for few recipe pages before continuing with the rest of the book. Through out the design process, the layout and visual elements underwent reviews and tweaks till we reached the final version of the book.
Variation with boiled bitter gourd
Variation with green banana
Variation with split green gram
Variation with split red gram
Variation with bitter gourd
Variation with patoli
Variation with raw tamarind
Variation with spinach
Ok, this thing brought tears to my eyes… (not the chillis!). Ten years waiting to see this.
Narasimha
Out of the frying pan, into the world
The final version of the book was printed on time for the author’s birthday. A few extra copies were printed for the family. After a long search, the author’s family have partnered with Jaico Publishing House and the book is out now. It is now known as The Andhra Cookbook, and available through major retail and online shops.
