Butter Chicken Lady

“There are so many Indians who grew up in India knowing how to cook, but who no longer have time to cook using traditional methods, or second-generation Indians whose parents cooked Indian food but never taught them,” she said. Many of them approach her recipes warily at first, skeptical that a dish whipped up in fifteen minutes could qualify as authentic Indian cooking. “But, as soon as they’re able to reproduce a dish they grew up with because of me, they’re totally committed,” she said. And even if traditional cooking techniques are being lost, she told me later, by e-mail, “I think what mothers and grandmothers would rejoice in is that the traditional tastes are now being passed on.”

-New Yorker