Kingsclere villager's recipe for success

Anglo Indian recipes and grandmothers' memoirs

A Kingsclere villager, who has published a collection of her relatives’ recipes handed down through the generations and interwoven with memoirs of their lives in India during the British Raj, is planning a trip to India later this year, to follow in their footsteps.

Author, Jenny Mallin says her book A Grandmother’s Legacy: A Memoir of Five Generations who lived through the Days of the Raj, came about after her relatives left behind a legacy of an old recipe book.

Mrs Mallin said: “It was started off by my great great great grandmother Wilhelmina Sausman in 1844.yrus

“She wrote down all her recipes in the most beautiful copperplate handwriting, and then handed it over to her daughter Ophelia Hardy, who did the same thing, and each generation passed that book on, writing down all their recipes, until the book finally ended up with me.”

The book, she said had triggered a “personal quest to follow in my grandmothers’ footsteps”, and she has planned a trip to India in November to visit the five different cities where they all lived at some point in their lives.

A former BBC researcher, Mrs Mallin spent the past six years researching their recipes and places where they lived, pointing out that some recipe names were unknown, being either Anglo Indian, or very old English recipes, since fallen into disuse.

The book is intertwined with family anecdotes and stories the author learned in her childhood of her grandmothers’ lives, along with her own, extensive travel experiences of India.

She said: “I have visited India more than 30 times now and spent anything up to one year staying with family and friends, not in hotels, so I believe I have seen India the best way possible.”

Within six weeks of going online with her author Facebook page, she has reached more than 285,000 people, with in excess of 4,000 likes and shares.

That has resulted in three Facebook groups engaged with her in a search to establish if her grandmothers’ houses still exist in Bangalore.

The book has been further enhanced by a foreword written by the charismatic and talented chef, Cyrus Todiwala, who wrote: “Often as Indians we think about the fabulous foods we ate in the home prepared by several aunts, grannies, our mums and we yearn as we grow older for these foods.

“The memories never go away. They may fade a bit.”