About Rose Whisk

I grew up playing with spices before I understood what they were for. As a kid I'd stand in the kitchen pretending I had my own cooking show — somewhere between Khaana Khazana and Heston's fantastical food was doing on television. I watched It Happens Only in India on Fox Traveller, David Rocco's Dolce Vita, Food Safari, Dolce India. I was that child who thought food was a portal — to places, to people, to ways of living I hadn't seen yet.

I started actually cooking in class 7 or 8, because the kitchen fascinated me. But long before that, every time I ate something that stayed with me — my nani ji's fruit custard, vanilla with bananas and grapes and pomegranate, made every time I visited her in the vacations — I'd spend years trying to recreate it. The taste was never quite the same. It never is. That gap between memory and recreation is what I write about.

RoseWhisk is my attempt to close that gap — not by recreating dishes perfectly, but by capturing why they mattered in the first place. The food, the stories behind it, the people who made it, the culture it came from.

I'm Vatsala Pandey, a published food writer based in Kanpur. My work has appeared in Goya Magazine. This blog is where I write about the food that tells our stories.