Vanita Vantakalu – Volume 1
Introduction
Rasam, the colour of beaten copper, simmers on the stove, tart with tamarind. It is just after 1pm on the 5th of March 2025. Outside, Barcelona is cold and wet, the kind of afternoon that quiets a city. The recipe for rasam comes from page 39 of Vanita Vantakalu, the small, orange-coloured Telugu cookbook my grandmother wrote and self-published in 1976. Since moving from Bangalore to Barcelona two years ago, I've been cooking from this little book as if it were a guide to making a home in a new city. That afternoon, 18 years to the day after I lost ammama, I set to work on bringing her original book back into print.
When it was published, Vanita Vantakalu was an unlikely sensation, selling 15,000 copies across three print runs. Ammama was a self-taught cook. According to my grandfather, she barely cooked until after their marriage in 1957 — save for the one time, at age 16, when she secretly entered a cooking contest and won it with her Mysore Pak. "I presumed the art of cooking ran in her blood," he says. The proceeds from the first edition paid for my mother's medical college fees. The book has been out of print since the last print run in 1983.
Over the years, as ammama's repertoire grew, she jotted recipes down on whatever was closest — scraps of paper, the backs of medical prescriptions, withered wedding invitations. At the time of her death in 2007, just nine weeks after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, over 300 recipes sat collected in a spiral-bound book she had never published. Hundreds more stuffed into cardboard boxes. Although I had never cooked until then, over the next nine years, I cooked my way through ammama's recipes to fulfil her dream of an English cookbook. That became Five Morsels of Love.
After I published Five Morsels in 2016, capturing 106 of ammama's recipes, readers began asking for the original Telugu book. A serendipitous encounter with ammama's editor, Namburi Paripurna — who shared memories of working with her — reopened my eyes to the true breadth of her lifetime's work, far vaster than what Five Morsels had captured. The final sign to revive the Telugu book came in June 2022, at the end of printing my second book Why Cook. The schedule board on the printing press simply read: Next job: Nirmala.
When I set out to bring my grandmother's original work back to life, I had no idea it would become its own undertaking. I soon realised that the vast repertoire of recipes needed to be categorised, tested for precise quantities and cooking times, and edited for clearer directions for a new generation — all while remaining true to ammama's voice and the spirit of the original work. When the full scope of the revisions became clear, I made the practical decision to divide the contents into three volumes: Vegetables; Meat; Sweets, Snacks & Condiments.
It takes a village, as they say. Chief among the challenges was the language — I had never worked in Telugu at a writerly level before, and the prospect was daunting. But help came from an unexpected place: Paripurna's granddaughter, Aparna, turned out to be a Telugu writer and stepped in as an editorial consultant. My mother, Kalpana, and aunt, Sadhana, patiently helped decipher the nuances in the recipes. My friend of 25 years, Chandana, became my co-editor. Sonya, who edited my previous two books, offered her expert counsel. And Eszter, who designed those books too, brought her extraordinary artistry again to this one.
Looking back, it feels as though ammama had been leaving breadcrumbs for me all along.
The dishes in this volume are inseparable from memory. Pachchi pulusu, the no-cook tamarind broth, carries me back to countless unhurried summer afternoons with ammama. The comfort of her miryala charu when I had a cold or the flu still lives in my body. The aroma of pachchi mamidikaya pulusu, even today, signals the arrival of summer for me. And ulava charu — an earthy, sustaining horse gram soup — takes me back to my wedding day, when ammama fed me a bowl of it with soft rice, laced with fresh cream. For years afterward, in every kitchen I moved to, I kept a frozen jar of it in my freezer. Alongside these inherited flavours sits a chapter, never shared before, of recipes from around the world that she made her own — from sweet & sour vegetables to au gratin.
If Five Morsels of Love ferried me through the loss of ammama, Vanita Vantakalu became my anchor and North Star when I unexpectedly moved thousands of miles from home — an unmooring not unlike grief. Dear Reader, the cooking you will find here echoes hundreds of years of tradition, and yet it is forgiving: it allows imprecision, the missing ingredient or two, the improvisations of a weekday evening.
It is the kind of cooking that holds you together when you come home alone in a new country.
Archana Pidathala
May 2026