My grandmother’s recipe for kubba hamuth—those sour, turmeric-stained dumplings swimming in a broth of beetroot and Swiss chard—came from a neighbour she never saw again after 1947. The neighbour was a Hindu woman from a village near Mosul. She used tamarind instead of lemon, a trick my grandmother picked up and handed to my mother, who handed it to me. I make this dish now in a quiet London kitchen, and every time I soak the tamarind pulp, I think about how a single sour note can carry the weight of a lost street, a lost friendship, a lost country.
We talk about partition as a political event, a line drawn on a map by men in distant rooms. But partition was also a knife drawn through the pantry. It severed not just territories but taste memories, scattering ingredients and techniques across newly hostile borders. The story of how borders changed what people ate—and what they forgot—is a story of adaptation, grief, and the quiet resilience of the kitchen.
The Geography of a Spice Box
Before 1947, the undivided Punjab shared a culinary vocabulary so deep it was almost a dialect. Cooks in Lahore and Amritsar reached for the same spices—cumin, coriander, dried pomegranate seeds, black cardamom—and built dishes around dairy, wheat, and slow-cooked meats. The tandoor was a communal oven, not a symbol of any one faith. Then the border was drawn, and millions of people moved in opposite directions, carrying what they could. Some carried spice boxes. Others carried only memories.
On the Indian side, the Punjabi Hindu and Sikh refugees who had fled from the west brought with them the taste for meat cooked in yoghurt and the heavy use of dried fenugreek. But they also bumped into new ingredients and new constraints. Many who had eaten goat and chicken freely before partition now lived in communities where vegetarianism was the norm. Tandoori chicken, which had been a rustic roadside food in pre-partition Punjab, was reinvented in Delhi’s Moti Mahal restaurant in the 1950s—cooked in a clay oven but served with a creamier, tomato-based gravy, butter chicken, to suit a more affluent, less rustic crowd. The dish became a global icon, but its origins in the campfires of a divided land were slowly forgotten.
On the other side of the border, in Pakistani Punjab, the refugee crisis brought an influx of muhajirs from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Hyderabad. They arrived with their own culinary traditions—delicate biryanis, koftas, the refined techniques of Mughlai court cooking. Lahore’s food scene absorbed these influences, and the city’s famous nihari, once a simple slow-cooked beef stew eaten by labourers, began to take on the richer, spicier character of the newcomers’ palate. Borders didn’t just separate cuisines; they created new ones, born from the pressure of displacement.
The Bread That Crossed the Line
Consider the humble roti. In the villages of Bengal, before 1947, the staple was rice, not wheat. But when Bengal was partitioned—first in 1905, then decisively in 1947—the eastern side, which became East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, found itself cut off from the rice-surplus regions that were now in India. The new state encouraged wheat consumption, partly out of necessity and partly to forge a culinary identity distinct from that of West Bengal. The roti, once a minor player in the Bengali diet, became a symbol of Muslim identity in East Pakistan, while the luchi (a deep-fried wheat bread) remained a festive food in West Bengal. The same grain, the same dough, but two different meanings.
In the Middle East, the story repeated itself with different ingredients. The 1948 war that established Israel and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians created a culinary rupture that is still felt today. Palestinian families who fled their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and the Galilee left behind not just houses and land but entire foodways—the specific taste of oranges from groves they had tended, the wild thyme (za’atar) they foraged on hillsides, the fish from the Mediterranean they had grilled on the beach. In refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, Palestinian cooks recreated what they could with UNRWA rations and local substitutes. The salad fattoush, which originally used whatever greens were available, became a dish of memory, each ingredient a placeholder for something lost: lettuce for wild chicory, cucumber for the crispness of fresh-picked purslane.
The Silences in the Recipe Book
What interests me most is not just what people ate after borders shifted, but what they stopped eating. The foods that disappeared from the table because the ingredients were no longer available, or because the dish was too painful to make, or because a new national identity demanded a new national cuisine.
In the early years of the Turkish Republic, for example, the government actively promoted a “national” cuisine that downplayed the Ottoman courtly traditions and the diverse regional cooking of Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, and Arabs. Dishes that were considered too “oriental” or too closely associated with minority communities faded from cookbooks and restaurant menus. The elaborate pilafs with currants and pine nuts, the dolmas stuffed with spiced lamb and served with yoghurt, the rosewater-scented puddings—these were replaced by a plainer, more homogenised idea of Turkish food, heavy on grilled meats and simple vegetable stews. It took decades for some of these lost dishes to resurface, often through the efforts of home cooks who had preserved them in private notebooks.
In Israel, a parallel process unfolded. The early Zionist project sought to create a new “Hebrew” cuisine that would break with the diasporic foods of Eastern Europe and the Arab world. European Jewish immigrants were encouraged to abandon the heavy, slow-cooked dishes of their grandparents—the cholent, the gefilte fish, the kugel—in favour of a lighter, more agrarian diet based on local produce: tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and dairy. At the same time, the foods of the Palestinian Arabs who remained were often appropriated and renamed: hummus, falafel, and shakshuka became “Israeli” dishes, their origins obscured. The forgetting was not accidental; it was a deliberate act of nation-building, a way of erasing the presence of the other from the national plate.
The Sweetness of Survival
Yet food also resists borders. It leaks across checkpoints and through barbed wire, carried in the minds of those who cross. My own family’s story is a testament to this. My father’s parents were Iraqi Jews who left Baghdad in the early 1950s, part of the mass exodus of a community that had lived in Mesopotamia for over two millennia. They arrived in Israel with almost nothing, but my grandmother brought her spice knowledge—the exact proportion of cinnamon to allspice in kubbah, the way to char an aubergine over an open flame until the skin blistered and the flesh turned smoky and soft.
In Israel, she found some of her ingredients but not others. The dried limes she had used in Baghdad were unavailable, so she learned to approximate their sourness with lemon juice and sumac. The thick, tangy amba—a fermented mango condiment—was nowhere to be found, so she made do with a chutney of green mangoes and fenugreek that was a pale imitation but still carried the ghost of the original. She never wrote these substitutions down. They lived in her hands, in the way she pinched salt and measured oil by the sound it made in the pan. When she died, some of those adjustments died with her. But others had already passed to my mother, and from her to me, and now I am trying to pass them to you.
This is the quiet work of the kitchen: not just feeding the living but keeping the dead at the table. Every time I make my grandmother’s kubba hamuth, I am eating with her, and with the neighbour whose name she never told me, and with a Baghdad that no longer exists except in the steam rising from the pot.
What Borders Buried
Some foods, though, are lost for good. The culinary archaeologist in me mourns them like extinct species. In the chaos of partition and population transfer, certain dishes simply vanished because the people who made them were scattered or killed, and no one wrote the recipes down. The Armenian communities of eastern Turkey, for instance, had a tradition of baking bread with mahleb, a spice made from cherry pits, and shaping it into braids for Easter. After the genocide and deportations of 1915, many Armenian bakeries in Anatolia closed forever. The bread survived in the diaspora—in Beirut, in Aleppo, in Yerevan—but the specific taste of the bread baked in the stone ovens of Van or Bitlis, using local wheat and water from a particular stream, was gone. Terroir is not just about soil and climate; it is about the hands that work the dough, and when those hands are stilled, the terroir dies with them.
In Cyprus, the 1974 division of the island created a similar culinary amnesia. Greek Cypriots in the south and Turkish Cypriots in the north both claimed halloumi as their own, but the cheese itself changed. Before 1974, halloumi was often made from a mixture of sheep’s and goat’s milk, and it was eaten fresh, within days of being made. After the division, commercial production scaled up, and cow’s milk became the norm. The fresh, squeaky cheese of memory was replaced by a saltier, firmer product designed for export. On both sides of the Green Line, people now eat a halloumi that is a descendant of the original, but not the original itself. The border didn’t just divide the island; it industrialised its most famous food.
Reclaiming the Lost Plate
In recent years, there has been a movement among chefs, food writers, and home cooks to recover what borders buried. In India and Pakistan, initiatives like the “Partition Museum” in Amritsar have collected oral histories that include detailed descriptions of pre-partition meals. Cooks on both sides of the border are exchanging recipes through social media, discovering that their grandmothers made the same saag with the same proportion of mustard leaves to spinach, the same tempering of garlic and dried red chillies. The realisation is both comforting and heartbreaking: we were never as different as the maps made us seem.
In Israel and Palestine, the work of culinary reclamation is more fraught, tangled as it is with ongoing occupation and displacement. Palestinian chefs like Sami Tamimi and organisations like the Palestinian Food Heritage Foundation are documenting traditional dishes and their histories, insisting on the Palestinian origin of foods that have been rebranded as Israeli. At the same time, some Israeli chefs of Middle Eastern descent are reclaiming the Arab-Jewish foods that the early Zionist establishment tried to suppress—the s’hug, the jachnun, the malawach—and presenting them proudly as part of a Mizrahi heritage that refuses to be erased.
This is not just about food. It is about acknowledging that cuisines are never pure, never static, never the property of a single nation. They are palimpsests, layered with the marks of everyone who passed through, everyone who stayed, everyone who was forced to leave. To eat a dish with full knowledge of its history is to taste the borders and the crossings, the losses and the survivals. It is to understand that the most intimate archive of political violence is often the one we carry in our mouths.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the partition of India specifically change everyday cooking for ordinary families?
For many families, partition meant a sudden and permanent break from the ingredients and cooking methods they had relied on for generations. Refugees who moved from Muslim-majority areas to India often had to adapt to a more vegetarian diet, swapping meat-based broths for lentil-based ones and learning to use asafoetida instead of onion and garlic in certain religious contexts. Those who moved to Pakistan found themselves in a new climate where certain spices were harder to grow, and they incorporated more local ingredients like sugarcane and mangoes into their cooking. The changes were practical at first but soon became emotional, as the taste of home became something that could only be remembered, not recreated.
Why do some foods become national symbols after borders change?
Food becomes a national symbol because it is a powerful tool for building identity. After a border shifts or a new state is formed, governments and cultural leaders often select certain dishes to represent the nation, emphasising their uniqueness and antiquity. This process usually involves simplifying the dish’s history, erasing the contributions of minority groups or neighbouring countries. The dish then becomes a point of pride and a way of asserting sovereignty—think of the fierce debates over the origin of hummus or the way borscht is claimed by both Russia and Ukraine. The irony is that the more a dish is used to draw a border, the more it reveals the shared history that the border tries to deny.
Can lost recipes really be recovered, or are they gone forever?
Some recipes can be partially recovered through oral histories, old cookbooks, and the memories of elderly cooks. But a recipe is more than a list of ingredients and instructions; it is also the context in which it was made—the specific variety of wheat, the water from a particular well, the feel of a certain clay pot, the sound of a specific market. These sensory details are almost impossible to recreate once the world that produced them has disappeared. What we can recover is the spirit of the dish, the technique, and the story. And in telling that story, we keep the dish alive in the only way that matters: as a memory that continues to feed the living.
So the next time you sit down to a meal that your grandmother taught you, or that you learned from a neighbour who has since moved away, take a moment to taste the borders in it. Taste the substitutions, the silences, the stubborn survivals. And know that you are eating history, one spoonful at a time.