Abstract

Culinary narratives read food memories for their sensory evocations and embodied experiences. This study analyzes the collection of culinary narratives in Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (2023) to understand how South Asian food memories reconstruct authenticity. The text contains historical food memories, essays, anecdotes, and recollections of childhood experiences with traditional cuisines and recipes. Intentional memory retrieval occupies the center stage in the texts, as they are compiled to resurrect the cuisines lost in time and to archive and preserve traditional recipes. As the text is a collection of thirty-three narratives of food memories by twenty-seven writers, including food enthusiasts, food historians, academicians, and culinary anthropologists from the pre- and post-partition era, it provides a viable platform to scrutinize how food and food narratives are reconstructed from the past. The objective of this study is to examine the reconstruction of food memory and cuisines of the South Asian Muslim community through the lens of the adaptive mechanism of reconsolidation. To explore the food memories in an interdisciplinary context that connects neural mechanisms and literary texts, the study employs textual analysis methodology on the chosen literary text. It is grounded in the theoretical framework of memory reconsolidation and cultural hybridity to understand how society attempts to reconstruct the lost culinary practices and traditional recipes. The study suggests that the adaptivity of the reconsolidation mechanism explains the reconstruction of food and cuisine in historical food narratives and their fluid nature of authenticity within the South Asian Muslim community.