I recently followed my dadi’s recipe for aloo gosht for the first time. It wasn’t very good. My dadi passed away long before I could learn to cook from her. Her longtime cook, Khalid, is the one who occasionally shows me how to prepare her recipes. Many family members will argue that he is not a trusted custodian of her food, and I should take his instruction with a grain of salt. But what if, sometimes, God forbid, your grandmothers’ recipes just don’t land?

In South Asia, we have a long tradition of being overly deferential to our elders. This especially applies to the uncontested knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers in kitchens. The “ma ke hath ka khana” (food from the mothers hand) has had a chokehold on our culinary conscience, all the way from Bollywood and Pakistani television dramas, to cooking videos and cookbooks. Leading Pakistani cookbooks, such as Sumayya Usmani’s seminal Summers Under the Tamarind Tree, to Shehar Bano Rizvis touching Virsa are tributes to their mothers and grandmothers, and of course, their food.

Heirloom recipes are beautiful cultural artefacts. Their ability to invoke a lost sense of time and place is astounding. But in the midst of the growing Pakistani diaspora’s fervor for nostalgia, are we missing the fact that our generation of Pakistani female cooks is not that bad either? Maybe even better?

Izzah Cheema, founder of the popular food blog, Tea for Turmeric, has a more balanced take, It’s not that we are better. We are more consistent,” she said. Cheema is a meticulous recipe developer, and has standardized a lot of the instructions on her website. While this is her full-time job, which requires her to apply more rigor, she says she sees this trend among her peers as well. While our mothers and grandmothers’ reliance on sensory cooking will not necessarily ensure consistent results, Cheema argues it allows them to understand the nuances of food in a much deeper way.

Asnia Akhtar who grew up between Lahore and Houston, and is now a private chef in New York City comes from a long line of gourmand matriarchs. “My nani was the original ‘trad wife’,” she laughs, “She would make everything from scratch.” Akhtar however, finds that the deep love for cooking hasn’t carried over to the current generation of Pakistani and Pakistani-American female cooks. She is surprised that despite coming from a long line of women cooking, this generation sometimes seems proud of the fact that they don’t know how to prepare food. This, according to Akhtar, manifests in modern couples relying on takeout, and also not distinguishing between the type of food that was typically prepared at home versus restaurants. “This is the boti and roti generation,” she says. They expect to eat the same rich and meat-heavy Pakistani food at home that previously, families would reserve dining out for.

The food delivery business in Pakistan has been growing in triple digits. This may in part be because less women cook at home. There are many more of them in the workforce. While it’s still far below the global average of 52.6 percent, Pakistani women made up 23.2 percent of the workforce in 2023 compared to 13.3 percent in 1991. Rabia Shakeel, co-owner and head chef at Lahore-based restaurant, For The Table, finds that dual-income households are not only resulting in more takeout but also towards dishes and cuisines, such as pan-Asian, that have shorter cooking times and require less dishes. “They are moving away from long and slow cooking as houses are getting smaller, and women are doing more roles,” she observes.

There is also a greater emphasis on health, especially among mothers. “It’s not calorie-focused but nutrition-focused,” Shakeel says, “You also find people going back to older methods.”

Alia Chughtai founded Aur Chaawal, a popular home catering business in Karachi that prepares homecooked desi food using pure, organic ingredients. While Chughtai originally made the switch in her own kitchen because of personal health reasons, she realized there was a growing market of health-conscious clients who also wanted to enjoy desi food without worrying about the integrity of the ingredients. This not only included older customers with ailments such as diabetes and high blood pressure but also younger ones who appreciated Aur Chaawals farm to table philosophy.

While the term, ‘farm to table,’ – the practice of sourcing ingredients directly from producers – sounds trendy in a Pakistani context, Akhtar reminds me that her nani’s kitchen in Kasur, was also farm to table and seasonal. And that her mother’s kitchen was creative and international, similar to how many millennial urban Pakistani kitchens are today.

Before moving to Houston, Akhtar's mother would frequently use food as a way of taking her to countries she never had the opportunity to travel to. “She would take me to these cooking classes organized by aunties who recently returned from Europe,” Akhtar remembers, Since my dad was in the navy, we also had a lot of colonial food traditions at home.” Akhtar recalls delicious pina coladas with coconut ice cream and decadent salads prepared with lobsters caught by navy diners.

Listening to Akhtar, and thinking about my mother and grandmothers’ own eclectic kitchens, it’s clear that even prior to the internet and economic liberalization of the 1990’s when more foreign products began to trickle in, Pakistani women were quietly absorbing international influences in their kitchen.

While the colonial hangover of British food is the most apparent – whether it be tea biscuits that lined our mother’s trolleys or the mulligatawny soup and sandwiches that are staple of clubs - there has been a long, chaotic line of foreign dishes that stuck. It’s beef chili dry, a sharp pan-Asian stir-fry in many homes; khao suey, the popular Burmese dish of bright beef curry and noodles topped with crispy fried garlic and Slims potato crisps; or the mysterious chicken a la kiev, breaded chicken fillets stuffed with butter and herbs.

For Chughtai, it was a chicken, broken wheat and broth dish that her mother prepared every Ramadan. For years, long after her mother had passed, Chughtai thought this dish – ‘daliay ka soup,’ as her family would call it – was her mothers own concoction. But it took for Chughtai to be served this exact soup by a Palestinian friend several years later to realize this wasn’t her mother’s creation at all. It was shorabet, a classic Palestinian chicken and freekeh soup, that her mother learned to prepare from her neighbor while living in Jeddah several decades ago.

If curiosity for international cuisine connects these two generations of kitchens together, then we must have also inherited the elusive skill of ‘andaza’ or sensory cooking. While I love recipes – the clarity, structure and rigor – and find that many millennial Pakistani women turn to them both in written and multimedia forms, they also know how to cook from their gut. Akhtar and Shakeel, both of whom are trained chefs, attribute their cooking intuition – their ability to cook from memory and imagination, and deftly substitute ingredients while living overseas – to their mothers.

I updated my dadis recipe for aloo gosht. I set clear metrics and cooking times, and tweaked the ingredients after I cross-checked it with similar recipes from my friend Izzah and old cookbooks. Its now, a much better recipe but I will still attribute it to my dadi.

A kind friend in Manila gently helped me reframe my original thesis. It’s not that we are better cooks than our mothers and grandmothers – we are better cooks because of them.