Our cookbook is officially open for preorder! You can order signed copies from your fave indie bookstores, or opt for unsigned copies via all major online retailers — head here to preorder! No matter where you preorder from, we have a special gift for you! Upload your receipt here and we’ll send you our digital Cookbook-let, a collection of 20+ bonus exclusive recipes that you can start cooking today!
For our 8-ish years in business, I’ve spent every January through March visiting our farm partners across India and Sri Lanka for spice harvest season. The most special and enduring moments of those visits are always sharing home-cooked meals under trees and by fires, with the amazing humans who grow the spices we source. Each visit left me asking: How can we share these incredible heirloom recipes—made with such care for seasonality and freshness, and rooted in culture and terroir—with our community? Five years and 40 collaborators later, our cookbook is my answer.
The Western perception of South Asian cooking is limited to savory dishes like samosas, paneer butter masala and chicken tikka — typically heavy, often fried, and packed with an unrecognizable medley of spices — and sugar-syrup-and-ghee-soaked desserts like gulab jamun and carrot halwa. However, my visits to our partner farms consistently showed me that South Asian cooking is, in fact, rooted in spice forward, veggie heavy simple dishes. Yet, to this day, there are no farm-to-table, seasonal South Asian cookbooks out there. I’ve never found a cookbook that truly centered Indian and Sri Lankan farm food: the terroir, the hands that grow the spices, the regional knowledge and historical context behind every dish.
Asha, Melati, and I spent 120 days from 2023 - 2024, gathering over 100 heirloom recipes from our spice farm partners. Then, we spent a whole year back in our California test kitchen, cross-testing each recipe, and adapting them for a global pantry. Our hope is that after reading and cooking from our cookbook, the scent of black pepper conjures up the lush hills of Kerala in your mind instead of steak au poivre, or when you’re craving a warming cinnamon-ey dessert, your mind goes to our Spiced Date Cake inspired by a Sri Lankan bakery instead of a Scandi cinnamon roll. It’s a cookbook designed to become your staple, but it’s also about shifting culture back to its origins.
Putting this cookbook together has been a rigorous, expensive process that we’ve poured our hearts and labor into. As many of you know, preorders are make or break for authors. As a trio of BIPOC authors, of a book highlighting Indian and Sri Lankan farm food, you can 5x the pressure on us to get this right! If you’ve ever loved our spices or our work, I would love for you to preorder our cookbook. Not only will it be incredibly meaningful to us, I promise that it will bring new inspiration to your everyday cooking, and change the way you think of your spices cabinet. This is our huge leap of faith in the pursuit of flavor, and I hope you will take it with us 💞
