Recipes die every day. Very occasionally, they come back to life

We live in a world where every grandma has a cookbook and where “ethnic granny” culture thrives online: nonnas hand-rolling pasta in the Italian countryside, yiayias folding grape leaves in a suburban kitchen, mamous and tettas and abuelitas teaching us to make sauce. But when I scroll through a feed of endearing old ladies, I often wonder about the recipes that died before this viral ancestral cooking trend began. Where’s the graveyard for the ones we lost?

I’m in Istanbul to answer this question, with Silva Ozyerli. Ozyerli is an Armenian who lives in Turkey, one of few. She is a resuscitator of recipes. For years, she travelled from Istanbul to her childhood home of Diyarbakir to track down dishes she was sure had gone extinct.

Ozyerli had been watching her historically diverse hometown lose its history. Its elders were dying, young people were moving to bigger cities and years of violent conflict, mostly between the Turkish army and Kurdish locals, meant buildings were getting destroyed too. “They were building a city with no memories,” she tells me. There were only a few hundred Armenians left. She was rushing to record every tradition she could remember, and many that she could not.

One day, Ozyerli found a history book written in Armenian called Voices of Diyarbakir, in a used bookstore in New York, of all places. Within two 500-page volumes was just a page and a half about Diyarbakir food. It mentioned a few traditional Easter dishes that she, an expert, didn’t recognise. So she flew back home in search of them.

I ran to her house with the pickles and chickpea meatballs. She tasted them both and started to cry

“I started going to local weddings and funerals,” she tells me. We are sitting in a café, drinking a traditional Armenian almond liqueur that she made. She’s wearing a loose white blouse, a pencil skirt and sneakers, and looks determined, like she’s about to run off and save a recipe. She says things like “I had to pour my soul out”, and “for our mothers, the kitchen was survival”, and “culture has a smell”, winking at me, with eyes like the almonds.

“You just walked up to tables of old people, introduced yourself and asked if they knew these dishes?” I ask her. Yes, she says. “Had you been invited?”

“Well, no one really gets invited to funerals,” she says, and we laugh.

“Did they remember?”

Yes, she says. One person told her, “Only my grandmother used to make this, and when she passed away no one ever made it again.” None of them knew the recipes. But they all assured her they would recognise the taste.

So she started to cook.

One elder was 94. She lived nearby in Istanbul. She described for Ozyerli a Lent meal made with chickpeas. She also remembered a version of tourshi, pickled vegetables, but instead of using vinegar for fermentation and flavour, they used salt and sourdough starter.

Ozyerli takes pleasure in my disbelief (“Sourdough?!”). “We didn’t know about this either! Maybe the widespread use of sourdough could be an innovation. An innovation learnt from history.”

She got the pickles in one try. The chickpea meatballs took more. Each time she returned the woman would say “Bigger!” Or “Spicier!” It was the diligent work of a historian: knowing that Diyarbakir didn’t have flour a century ago, Ozyerli tried semolina to bind them. It worked. Finally, on the fifth try, she nailed it.

“I ran to her house with the pickles and chickpea meatballs. She tasted them both and started to cry.”

I shift towards her. “What was it like to watch her eat?”

Ozyerli speaks Turkish and Armenian. I speak neither. Sometimes I see tears in my translator’s eyes as she listens to Ozyerli and I sit there, waiting for the feeling.

She says she knows when a bite of those dishes makes someone cry, she’s doing something right. She says her ancestors would be proud. “I felt like I had cooked a feast for them.”

Ozyerli wrote a book — half memoir, half cookbook — called Amida’s Table. It was published in Turkish in 2019, an incredible hit. The family stories are tender and alive. But the recipes, though also beautiful, read like something you’d find in a normal cookbook. There’s no subheading that says “This recipe went extinct, and I brought it back to life.” I wish there was.

I met Ozyerli in September, on my own journey exploring how culture gets passed on through food. Mine started with my two grandmothers. They were both from a region called Anatolia, cradled by the fertile crescent and the Black Sea, often called Asia Minor. Most of Anatolia is now situated inside Turkey. My ancestors, like millions of Greeks and Armenians, lived there for centuries, in distinct neighbourhoods, alongside Turks, Jews, Kurds and other ethnic minorities. They were dislocated around the time of the first world war, as the Ottoman Empire was falling, attempting to purify as it formed a nation.

In this horrific shuffle, my Armenian ancestors survived a genocide; they landed in New England. My Greek grandparents travelled in caravans to northern Greece. A genetic test I spat in one day came back declaring that I’m 100 per cent from a narrow group of regions around Trabzon, places that have almost no traces left of my people or their culture. A strange sort of purity. Seeing this mapped, I felt what I can only describe as mourning, for a place I can’t easily go or fully know.

Instead, my cultures live in the diaspora, in cracks and crevices of oral histories, of old folded scraps of paper, of recipes. I’ve found that food has the best clues. When people are displaced, the pain runs deep. You see it in Ukraine, in Palestine, in Syria. You see across cultures how fear of erasure transfers down, from parent to child. I feel it, inherited, in me. But culture lives on, reliably, through food. Food is sneaky. When my father’s Greek family came to Massachusetts to eat at my Armenian grandmother’s table, they spoke different languages, but they laughed, because the food was almost the same.

Armenians aren’t alone. When I started reading about lost recipes, I discovered Wayan Sutariawan, a fine-dining chef collecting lost dishes from across Indonesia. Food historian Tarana Husain Khan is reviving lost Muslim culinary heritage in India, working with scientists to regrow extinct varieties of rice. Savannah-based chef Mashama Bailey is taking clues from old antebellum cookbooks to reclaim black cooking in the US.

“We are really competing with time,” chef Rotanak Ros tells me over a video call from Siem Reap, Cambodia. Ros, 39, popularly known as Chef Nak, has spent years recording lost recipes from before her own culture’s rupture. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime killed two million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population, through work, torture and starvation. “Our food was so rich,” she said. “But it became survival food.”

Ros and her team travelled to small villages across Cambodia to ask the elderly how they cook. Initially, many shrugged her off. After the Khmer Rouge, many survivors stopped believing that they have a cuisine.

“Every time I ask people about their cuisine, they say, ‘It’s nothing, just a few dishes.’ They don’t see their value,” she tells me. “We have to do a lot of explaining. And that can spark their memory.”

Ros spends days in these villages. Some elders can’t cook any more but remember ingredients, which she’ll note down. Sometimes they instruct their children. Throughout it, Ros asks questions, and her team films everything. She has helped revive a rare version of korko soup using Cambodian mint, a forgotten royal dish of caramelised pork soup with daylily flowers, and more.

Sometimes an elder will seem disappointed in their dish. “They’ll tell me, ‘It’s not because anything is missing. It’s because we were too hungry at that time. Everything had a stronger taste.’”

When Ros returns home, she tweaks, remeasures and cooks these dishes repeatedly for tasters. She posts videos online and puts the recipes in cookbooks. And over the years she’s become beloved — Cambodia’s first female celebrity chef.

Before she died, my aunt Maria gave me her recipe for her famous apricot jam, which calls for six kilos of apricots and four kilos of sugar. It’s a comical fruit-to-sugar proportion. Even the volume of ingredients sounds insane. So I’ve never tried it. But recently, I tasted a homemade apricot jam in Crete that was identical.

I told the jam maker that it tasted familiar. “What makes it unique,” she said, “is that, in fact, it doesn’t use much sugar at all.” Baffled, I smuggled it home for my father to taste. He dipped a spoon and nodded. And for that moment, Maria was alive, standing next to us in my kitchen.

It made me think, what exactly are we trying to do here? If I used this new Cretan recipe instead of Maria’s, would that do the job of bringing her back just as well? If Ozyerli’s recreated dishes aren’t exactly right but they taste right to her 94-year-old neighbour, are they, in fact, perfect? Maybe we’re trying to revive, or maybe we’re just trying to remember.

For Ozyerli, this work is political. It’s historic documentation. She records as faithfully as possible, recommending copper pots, unprocessed ingredients and whole grains you grind at home. For her, one of few Armenians left in the homeland, to resurrect recipes is a form of resistance.

Ros is rushing to make an entire cuisine permanent while those who remember are still alive (“Whatever we have created here, this will be history.”) She’s also doing this work to reach us, to change how the world sees her country. Her videos have English subtitles, and her cookbooks, Nhum and Saoy, are published in Cambodian and English. “We are more than Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields,” she tells me. “If we don’t promote this cuisine, who’s going to know about us?”

My reason might be sentimental. I’m still not sure. Maybe I’m trying to bring my ancestors back to life. Maybe lost recipes are just like all the questions we regret never asking, whose answers we’ll never know. All we can do is deduce. Keep cooking. And definitely write it down. The dish may not be perfect, but it’ll mean more every time we try.

Lilah Raptopoulos is the host of FT Weekend’s Life & Art podcast. Email her at lilah.raptopoulos@ft.com 

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